Best startup in Slovenia revealed
Astra AI, a company that has developed personalised AI tutors used by tens of thousands of Slovenian students, has been declared the country's best startup of 2025.
The Start:up Slovenia judging panel was impressed by Astra AI's innovation, advanced use of AI, and a strong potential for global growth, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.
"This is a clear sign that we are taking the right steps," said Astra AI director and co-founder Andrej P. Škraba.
The company traces its roots to the website astra.si, which was launched by Škraba, an economist and maths enthusiast, in 2013 as a series of free videos with simple explanations of maths problems.
The website will be familiar to many parents of primary and secondary school students for its simple explanations that cover the entire maths curriculum for primary and secondary schools.
In 2023 Škraba joined forces with Klemen Selakovič, one of Slovenia's most prominent podcasters, to turn the website into a fully-fledged AI tutor offering instruction in mathematics, physics, chemistry, English and German.
In view of its teen user base, the company has leaned heavily on social media promotion and Škraba says it now has over 170,000 users.
Chief technology officer Tjaž Silovšek recently posted on Linkedin that the company uses in excess of 50 billion tokens per month for the AI capacity that underpins the service.
A token is a piece of text that a large language model such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini breaks everything into so it can read, think, and talk.
The title Startup of the Year is handed put by the Start:up Slovenija initiative in cooperation with the Slovenian Enterprise Fund and the Ministry of Economy, as well as other active stakeholders in the field.
