A mentor every kid can talk to.
NELL is the Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age — a patient teacher that draws as it speaks.
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How it works
Your child talks to it
No typing, no reading required. They ask the question they actually have, in their own words.
It answers out loud, and draws
Pictures appear as the words are said — the way a good teacher sketches while explaining.
It remembers them
It learns how your child thinks and asks better questions instead of lecturing. Every child names their own device. Ours is called NELL.
Curated, not generated.
Every picture a child sees was drawn by a person. More than 500,000 hand-drawn, rights-cleared educational illustrations, built over fifteen years of professional production and reviewed before they shipped.
A retrieval system finds and composes the right pictures mid-sentence, in milliseconds. Nothing on the screen is invented on the spot.
Octopus, cutaway — one main heart, two gill hearts. Composed into the answer as it is spoken.
Nothing else on it. On purpose.
The device runs one thing. There is no way in and no way out. A parent can hand it to a five-year-old and relax.
One camera, and it faces the world. NELL looks at what your child is looking at — never at your child. No model has a front-facing camera. A child photographs a beetle, a road sign, a page of their own handwriting, and asks.
- a browser
- an app store
- YouTube
- games
- notifications
- the open internet
- a glowing backlit screen
One-to-one tutoring is the most effective intervention education has — 0.3 to 0.8 standard deviations across hundreds of studies. It never scaled because it costs a human hour per child hour.
that is the constraint NELL removes
You can see the learning without standing over it.
Every parent knows you cannot make a child want to learn something. This is the first product that routes around that instead of fighting it.
A simple dashboard
What your child asked about, what they worked out, where they are getting stronger. Real progress, plainly shown.
Suggest a topic
Fractions this month, or volcanoes. The mentor weaves it into conversation when the moment fits — never as an assignment.
Private by architecture
- The child's profile lives on the device.
- Voice is transcribed and discarded. No voiceprints.
- The one camera faces the world, never the child.
A paper-like screen, not another glowing tablet. Non-backlit color e-ink, built so a child comes away with more every time they put it down.
Between us, we've already built every piece this needs.
Jon Corbiere
Co-founder · The library + the techSeventeen years of educational animation. His studio, Thought Café, was the animation studio behind Crash Course's Thought Bubble segments — roughly 2,000 episodes on one of the most-watched educational channels ever made. That work built NELL's 500,000-illustration library. He is also the founder of FutureTalk, whose voice AI runs in production today.
Peter Diamandis
Co-founder · Distribution + methodologyFounder of XPRIZE and co-founder of Singularity University and Abundance360. A New York Times–bestselling author. The coaching framework underneath NELL grew out of his work with hundreds of founders.
Max Song
Co-founder · Go-to-marketEntrepreneur-in-Residence at PHD Ventures. Forbes 30 Under 30. Schwarzman Scholar. He builds NELL's path to families through one of the most far-reaching networks in education and science.
Mingzhu He
Founding team · Learning design + researchTwo decades designing how technology helps people learn. Led Samsung's Future of AI for Education initiative. She shapes how NELL actually teaches.
Plenty of teams can build a tutor. We're the one that already has the pictures.