AI is changing how people build software, design products, practice law, and access healthcare. Education should move just as quickly.
The opportunity is to make learning more personal, more contextual, and more useful: an affordable engineering tutor with world-class courseware, or a learning environment with the memory and context management people expect from modern AI tools. Those experiences are still early. So we launched the Worldwide Venture Fellowship to help builders create them.
Over 100 days, fellows work in small teams, share weekly progress, and turn an idea into a first pilot. This Spring 2026 cohort includes people building K-12 tutors, live assessments for hiring, and other AI-native education solutions.
Meet the 15 fellows
- Jeremiah “Jay” Johnson is an AI-native storyteller and educator who helps lead global team workshops.
- Vedansh Mannem started a math-tutoring nonprofit and is exploring AI tools such as an SAT-question generator for practice tests.
- Xiangan He runs a development shop that has worked with Google, State Street, and YC-backed startups. He is building the kind of learning support he wished he had earlier in his education.
- Barbara Jauregui Wurst founded an Acton Academy alternative school in the DC area, inspired by her children’s love of learning. She wants to help young people thrive with new tools.
- Lilian Gong is a learning-engineering researcher at ASU who built a French tutor bot with a multi-agent LLM system. She is exploring alternatives to traditional homework for cultivating and assessing skills.
- Oleksandra “Sasha” Pariy is a CEO and product builder who created a vector-embedding database that lets students chat with large PDFs and receive accurate citations.
- Scott Nicoll has taught critical thinking in Asia for more than 10 years and is exploring a contrarian tutor to build self-awareness and independent thinking.
- Feodor is building a startup community at ITMO in Saint Petersburg and exploring global education opportunities.
- Ryan Leong has worked across underwater robotics and real estate startups and is exploring ways to increase AI literacy for young people.
- Harsh Thakkar is in an applied global program in Accra, Ghana, partnering with public-school teachers on hands-on learning models.
- Michael Davola leads technology staff development at a public school on Long Island, New York. He built a video self-reflection coach for student journals.
- Maruthi Vemula built an adaptive system that helps people determine what to learn next, moving beyond fixed curricula.
- Morgan Hough is a computational-psychiatry and cerebral-organoid researcher who explored Zuna, a brain foundation model using EEG data.
- Joseph Ching is a higher-education program manager focused on AI literacy for current students and new models for accreditation.
- Jasjeev Singh has been working on support for neurodevelopmental care and education. He built a children’s game that helps families explore learning styles.
Build in public with us
The fellows will share what they build throughout the cohort. If you run a community or school that wants to pilot new tools, we would love to hear from you.
Worldwide Studios is a California 501(c)(3) education nonprofit helping professionals build with the latest AI, hardware, and applied-science tools.