COMPANY AND PRODUCT STORY
Built on the educator's own material. Plan, create, teach, assess, support and analyse, all in one orchestration layer.
Generative AI is eroding university trust and pedagogical authority.
Tortin empowers professors instead of replacing them.
A tenure-track professor and an AI-native builder.
Enterprise cycles cracked via non-procurement budgets.
24 months to profitability and category leadership.
Act I
The Authorship Crisis
ChatGPT becomes the 2 AM default tutor. Answers arrive detached from the syllabus, and the feedback loop that tells faculty where learning breaks simply disappears.
When faculty turn to generic AI to prep, what comes back is textbook consensus: no course readings, no case studies, none of the framing that made the course theirs. Twenty years of expertise, returned as something anyone could have written.
Zero telemetry on student interactions with external engines — while liability for hallucination, integrity and FERPA/GDPR sits squarely with the university.
“Generative AI didn't just automate tasks; it triggered an authorship crisis. Students bypass faculty completely. Professors lose their voice. And administrations have lost sovereign control over data, integrity, and pedagogical governance.”
Author
Build the lesson — slides, readings, activities, AI labs — in one editor.
From what she already has, the professor orchestrates lessons, builds and deploys a grounded tutor, runs case studies, creates and auto-grades assessments, and sees who is struggling before the exam. Our Founding Faculty Network of ambassador professors keeps co-designing new tools (case simulations, AI labs, timed quizzes, practice sandboxes) that every educator on the platform can use. The tutor is one tool in an ever-expanding toolkit.
“Let's work it out together — what does Lecture 6, slide 12 say about marginal cost before we solve for equilibrium?”
Source: Week 6 deck, p.12
Slides, activities, games, problem sets and rubrics are generated from the professor's own material and edited by them — the lesson is theirs before class starts.
The professor decides what appears on every screen and when: release a slide, open a task, unlock or lock the tutor, read confusion live and change course mid-hour.
Socratic, coaching or drill; corpus-only or open web allowed — every behaviour is theirs to set, per course. The system executes their teaching, it doesn't substitute it.
Works standalone from day one, or plugs into the LMS the university already runs. No migration, no committee, no waiting on central IT.
“Universities tried banning AI, and it failed within 48 hours. Professors don't need another chatbot. They need their time back. They upload their material once and Tortin becomes their teaching orchestration platform. For a professor it feels like a dedicated teaching assistant; for an institution it is one governed platform. Plan the course, create the lesson, teach live, assess and auto-grade, support students in context, and see how every student is doing. It stays grounded in their material and cites their exact slide.”
A Geneva-based non-profit that trains executives runs its first programme on Tortin, on anti-corruption. Next: all of its trainings, and an AI readiness certification launched together.
Professors at HEC Lausanne, EDHEC and the University of Geneva, plus the Olympic Studies Centre. This is where the toolkit was built and where it keeps growing.
A signed, active pilot with HiEX and the International Olympic Committee brings the same toolkit to school teachers and their students.
Feedback style, past exam questions, student blindspots.
Slides, readings, rubrics — compounding every semester.
AI that behaves like this professor, not any professor.
Replacing Tortin would mean discarding years of refined course intelligence. The model is owned by the Professor and improves over time. We build the harness and the pathways to allow a Professor to do this.
“Why can't a university simply switch to a generic LMS copilot later? Because of this flywheel. It builds a compounding institutional knowledge bank that makes Tortin virtually impossible to replace.”
Inside the institution
LinkedInTenure track at HEC Lausanne, published scholar with direct access to Swiss and EU academic leadership. Understands governance, institutional politics, pedagogical integrity and grant dynamics from the inside.
Shipping at start-up speed
LinkedInComputer-science trained builder and enterprise growth operator. Scaled Capdesk through its acquisition by Carta; rapid prototyping, growth loops and B2B SaaS scaling.
TrustFaculty open doors for a colleague, not a vendor. Pilots land inside departments because one of us already sits in them.
VelocityWhat a faculty conversation reveals on Monday is running in the product by Friday — the loop most EdTech never closes.
“Enterprise EdTech is littered with products built by engineers who have never stood in front of a lecture hall. We bridge the chasm between academic trust and rapid AI execution.”
Per course, per semester. Paid from a discretionary teaching budget or grant — no central procurement. HEC Lausanne and EDHEC landed this way.
Per department. Multiple courses from the same department consolidate into a single licence — it grows the account without a new procurement process.
Campus-wide site licence, unified AI gateway and governance. The provost/rector signs only after the course memory already lives inside the institution.
“Selling to universities usually takes 18 agonizing months. We don't wait for provosts to form committees. We land at Tier 1 — funded directly by a professor's pedagogical grant — and expand once the department sees 122 hours saved.”
1. The CHF 800K Seed builds our commercial team across Europe and the Gulf. Professors adopt Tortin course by course — a pilot costs a department nothing to approve — and become the reference that carries a full institutional licence. 2. A Series A of about CHF 3M in late 2028, at roughly CHF 2.9M of ARR, saturates Europe and the Gulf, opens North America, and turns the organisational line into a proper second vertical — international federations, UN bodies, NGOs and professional academies. The business reaches cash-flow break-even in January 2029. 3. By 2030 the plan reaches CHF 35.59M of revenue, CHF 37.51M of exit ARR and CHF 11.52M of EBITDA, across 142 institutions, 176 organisational deployments and 372,000 learners.
“Over 1,000 learners are actively using Tortin across five elite paid pilots, including HEC Lausanne, LUMS, University of Geneva, and the UN. Our QSTP incubation gives us a sovereign landing pad into the GCC higher-ed market.”
Swiss academic prestige (HEC Lausanne, IMD, Geneva) paired with GCC state-backed anchors via QSTP. Rigor plus capital — each one hand-won.
Hub-and-spoke through Swissnex, European university consortia and Qatar Foundation. One anchor win opens streamlined 1-to-N procurement across its network.
Professors publish, cite and keynote with their tutor in the loop. Discovery stops being outbound; installation is a 15-minute Moodle/Canvas LTI plugin.
Deliberately not counted
Org deployments sit outside all three numbers. International organisations, federations and professional bodies — the IOC is already a customer — add to the market rather than share it: 45 international organisations and ~750 NGOs around Lake Geneva, plus 206 National Olympic Committees and ~40 recognised federations. Left out on purpose, so every figure above has a build-up behind it.
Sources & build-up
TAM: Grand View Research LMS market (CHF 27.28B, 2026) × academic share (60.6%) × higher-education portion. SAM: 4,376 EHEA institutions (EHEA Key Data 2022/23) + ~250 GCC + 2,637 US four-year (NCES) × CHF 150K blended contract value. SOM: 25% of those with discretionary teaching budget. Cross-check: the European portion is CHF 388 per teaching post per year across 1.79m academic staff (Eurostat, HESA).
“Because professors publish and present at international conferences, our academic virality drives zero-touch, 15-minute LMS installations globally.”
ACT VIII — THE ASK
Scaling campus by campus, continent by continent.
Enterprise sellers across Europe, the Gulf and North America — the first hire is the person who runs commercial.
Live lesson infrastructure, multi-model gateway, governance hardening.
EU AI Act readiness, FERPA/GDPR certification. Swiss rules potentially coming.
The binding constraint is not capital — it is hiring and ramping enterprise sellers. Faculty revolt, EU AI Act enforcement and student normalisation converged in 2026. This is the window.
“This funds a commercial team across Europe and the Gulf, and takes us to roughly CHF 2.9m of ARR by H2-2028 — where Series A follows, and the Scale stage opens North America and turns the organisational line into a second vertical on the way to CHF 35.59M of 2030 revenue.”
