Oboe launches AI app for instant personalized micro-courses

Oboe launches AI-first app to build micro-courses from a prompt

Oboe, the new education startup from Anchor co-founders Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano, is live with an app that converts a single user prompt into a lightweight, personalized course in seconds.

The founders — who sold Anchor to Spotify — built Oboe after helping scale Spotify’s audiobooks business and taking time off. The product targets lifelong learners across science, history, languages, pop culture, life transitions and more, offering quick paths to surface-level or deeper study.

Oboe supports nine course formats designed for different learning styles. Instead of a back-and-forth chatbot, users can choose text and visuals, audio, games, interactive tests and structured reading with real images pulled from the web.

• Text and visuals — lightweight reading formats with real images
• Audio lecture — university-style single-host format
• Two-host podcast-style audio — conversational deep dives
• Games and interactive tests to boost engagement and retention

Behind the scenes Oboe relies on a custom multi-agent architecture that runs many components in parallel. That system drafts course structures, generates and verifies material, scripts audio, and fetches real images — all orchestrated to create a polished course in seconds.

• Develop course architecture and sequencing
• Create, verify, and audit source material to reduce errors
• Write scripts for audio formats and produce conversational hosts
• Pull and integrate real web images and visuals into reading formats

Oboe emphasizes personalization and a lightweight user choice: skim a topic quickly or follow a recommendation engine to go deeper. The startup is building suggestions that help learners keep drilling into adjacent subjects if they want more depth.

At launch, anyone can consume courses for free and creators can generate five free courses per month. Paid tiers add more course-creation credits: Oboe Plus ($15/month for 30 courses) and Oboe Pro ($40/month for 100). Web and mobile web are live, with native iOS and Android apps coming.

The company is a small team of five full-time employees. Mignano remains at Lightspeed as a partner while serving on Oboe’s board. The startup closed a $4 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures with several notable angel and VC backers.

Why it matters: Oboe fits into a broader trend of AI making content creation instant and personalized. For educators, publishers and corporate training teams this can dramatically lower the friction to produce tailored learning paths. But it also raises questions about verification, bias and long-term learning efficacy — which is why content auditing and measurement are essential.

Organizations looking to adopt tools like Oboe should pair rapid content generation with safeguards: automated fact-checking agents, human review workflows for sensitive topics, and analytics that measure retention and transfer. That combination helps unlock scale without sacrificing trust.

Oboe’s launch is a practical test of whether AI can genuinely improve how people learn on the internet — shifting the web from attention-driven distractions toward structured, bite-sized learning experiences that fit modern life.