PalFish
Education technology start-up “PalFish” chose its name ten years ago to associate itself with small fish swimming freely in a vast ocean of knowledge. Ten years later, PalFish has grown into a provider of interactive online reading and language services with 70 million users worldwide, by successfully combining that image with the most modern technology.
“Artificial intelligence is reshaping education just as the printing press did back in the day. It breaks the dependency on scarce learning resources by providing scalable, higher-quality ‘AI teachers’,” said Xiao Li, vice president of PalFish International in a recent interview with Forbes China. That scale “is already reshaping the cost structure of the education sector, where competition no longer depends on capital scale, but on the understanding of technology, application speed and product iteration capabilities,” he said.
Speed was highlighted by PalFish founder and CEO Henry Huang in remarks during the company’s 10e anniversary party earlier this year. “During our fifth anniversary we introduced the slogan ‘Keep Evolving.’ Today, we elevate it to ‘Evolving Speed Is Everything’, setting even higher expectations for speed,” said Huang, co-founder of Chinese social media giant ByteDance.
Sales of privately held PalFish, headquartered in Beijing, reached $100 million in 2024 and will double this year due to its popularity among three- to 12-year-olds, Li said. International business – with an emphasis on Southeast Asia – accounts for about 20% of that total and is expected to grow by 150% this year. Next: Li aims to widely expand PalFish’s ties in the fast-growing Middle East markets over the next three years.
PalFish wants to expand its learning centers in the Middle East.
PalFish
PalFish’s expansion in Southeast Asia has benefited from a macroeconomic rebound as trade supports growth in the region. Since opening its first location in Bangkok in 2023, PalFish has created a total of 14 overseas PalFish centers, including 10 in Thailand and four in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang. By the end of 2025, the company plans to open five more branches in Southeast Asia, Li said. Among activities in this area, PalFish organized a Speech Contest in Bangkok and the EdTech Forum in Hanoi this year. PalFish’s rapid growth over the years has helped the company attract funding from top international investors such as GGV Capital and the Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund.
To offer compelling solutions to individual students around the world, PalFish uses an AI tutor named ‘Mia’. Mia is not “a simple chatbot, but (part of) complex systems designed as ‘super teachers’ capable of independently completing an entire lesson, including explanations of knowledge, interactive question-and-answer sessions, generating personalized exercises based on real-time student feedback, and sensing emotional states to provide encouragement,” Li said.
“Although AI could only conduct interactive questions and answers in the past, it can now deeply understand children’s thinking and learning situations, and in some ways even surpass human teachers,” he said. “PalFish’s self-developed AI intelligent teachers can provide one-on-one, complete process teaching and achieve a high degree of accuracy through massive data training,” said Li. AI assistants generate learning reports after class, allowing “care teams” to provide efficient feedback to parents and students, “improving collaboration efficiency between cross-border teams and reducing management inefficiency due to cultural differences.”
As a result, Li believes that today’s new era of AI is reshaping content and learning methods and advancing a generation of young users beyond the early Internet idea of ”digital native.”
“Today’s technological revolution has brought education companies back to a new starting line, where the key to competition is the speed of evolution. The most profound impact of AI on education is that children can truly become ‘AI natives’ and learn to collaborate and create with AI from an early age,” Li said. For families and school districts facing budget constraints, AI approaches can help significantly reduce the cost of course materials and shift learning from “passive adoption” to “active creation,” he said.
PalFish International Vice President Xiao Li.
PalFish
In addition to language learning apps for children such as PalFish Class, PalFish English and PalFish Read, the company generates revenue from hardware such as ‘Learn Station’, ‘Brainy Pad’ and intelligent floor lamps for eye protection. Course packages are usually customized to the user’s needs, Li said, with prices ranging from $200 to $5,000 in different Southeast Asian markets.
PalFish is already expanding from English to multi-disciplinary businesses such as mathematics, Li said. To adopt technology globally, education companies must continuously update their products and operations to meet diverse local needs, he continued. “In this sense, AI is not just a tool, but also an accelerator that drives education companies to transform faster and more effectively globally,” he said.
PalFish practices what it preaches, using AI internally to help manage its workforce and support its expansion abroad. “We use AI not only to improve educational services, but also to optimize cross-cultural team management,” Li said. “AI-powered internal systems help supervisors expand their management radius, achieve precise collaboration across global teams, and promote organizational flattening to accelerate decision-making.”
At home, Li also receives down-to-earth product advice behind the scenes: his family reads PalFish’s picture books and uses the online one-on-one English tutorials. They are a direct source of feedback, he said, and help PalFish “continue to improve products or service in a timely and timely manner.”
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