PAMETNA HRVATSKA Sven Ćurković

Guest Sven ĆurkovićHosted by Boris ŽivkovićMay 3, 2026

Sven Ćurković

About this episode

What you'll hear in this conversation

Students struggle most with math, right? Sven Ćurković's team at Repetitio.AI found otherwise: for many, history is the greater challenge, overwhelming them with facts and demanding rote memorization. This insight drove the creation of Repetitio, an AI-powered application designed to make learning less about *how* to study and more about simply engaging with the material. Ćurković, the company's founder, has built an app that lets students photograph their textbook pages, then uses artificial intelligence to distill the content into digestible questions and answers. Crucially, it deploys a spaced repetition algorithm to present these questions at optimal intervals, aiming to boost learning efficiency by up to 200%. It’s a move away from the passive reading students often default to, replacing it with active recall. This conversation delves into the strategic choices behind Repetitio: why focus on humanities over STEM, the decision to target the American market first, and the freemium model designed to ensure broad access. You’ll walk away considering how specialized AI can remove the organizational burden from learning, and which problems in education are truly ripe for a technical solution.

Insights from the conversation

What to take from this episode

Repetitio.AI's survey revealed that for students, history is as challenging as math, not because of its difficulty, but due to "too much information to remember" and a lack of interest. The lesson is that a product isn't solving the right problem until it uncovers the *actual* user pain, which is often distinct from the obvious one.

Repetitio's core promise is that students "don't have to think about how they will learn" – they simply photograph pages, and the AI handles the distillation, question generation, and spaced repetition. The real value of AI in education isn't just content delivery, but offloading the cognitive load of *organizing* the learning process itself.

While "everyone focuses on STEM," Repetitio.AI intentionally targets social sciences like history, avoiding subjects that require calculation. The strategic move isn't always to chase the largest or most popular category, but to find the underserved market where your specific solution offers the most distinct advantage.

Repetitio.AI uses "small, focused language models" that do "exactly that one thing very well and very cheaply," unlike general-purpose AI like ChatGPT, which is "very expensive to maintain and use." For a specific product, the right AI isn't the one that can do everything, but the one engineered to do *one thing* with maximum efficiency and minimal cost.

Repetitio.AI targets the US market first, not only because it's the largest with 100 million K-12 students, but also because of the higher "willingness to pay" among parents and greater tech adoption. The right initial market isn't just about scale, but about the specific cultural and economic conditions that make a product viable.

When asked if the app might "encourage sloppiness," Ćurković dismisses the concern, noting that similar arguments were made against calculators or "any technology." Any new tool that simplifies a complex task will face accusations of "dumbing down"; the only true measure of its value is its long-term impact on user capability.

Repetitio.AI aims for broad access, offering a free, ad-supported version because "not everyone can afford it," with a premium tier for additional features and no ads. When building an educational tool, a mission-first approach often means designing the business model around access, rather than solely on revenue maximization.

Existing studies on spaced repetition and active recall, the techniques Repetitio employs, show students "memorize 200% more in a shorter time." When presenting an education solution, the most compelling argument isn't about general improvement, but about specific, quantifiable boosts to learning efficiency.

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