Noto, a startup that provides software to automate tasks like billing and payroll for educational businesses, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding led by Base10 Partners.
AJ Ding and Steve Wang founded the startup after they spent last summer knocking on the doors of small firms across New York City, and they kept hearing the same story: business was booming, but operations were a mess.
“We ended up interviewing about 150 businesses over two weeks, walking around six hours a day,” Ding, Noto’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.
The pair said many of the lesson-based businesses they visited — including tutoring centers, music schools, and driving schools — still ran on sticky notes, Google Sheets, and outdated software systems.
Owners were “drowning in admin,” Ding said.
Ding told BI that Noto’s platform, which launched in September 2024, is designed specifically for lesson-based businesses and their unique operational challenges. They include managing parent-child-instructor relationships, shifting schedules, and complex billing rules.
Noto uses large language models to draft lesson reports, reschedule classes, and summarize parent communication. The goal, Ding said, isn’t to replace tutors but to free up their time.
Ding, a second-time founder and Yale-trained statistician, previously built an AI recruiting platform. His cofounder, Wang, was the founding engineer at Nitra, a software company for doctors’ offices backed by A16z.
“The lesson-based business segment has been chronically underserved by technology,” Caroline Broder, a partner at Base10, said.
With the new funding, Noto plans to grow its engineering team, hire a business operations lead, and improve the platform’s AI capabilities, including AI onboarding, rolling out student-facing insights, and AI-assisted admin agents.
