Yakov Yarmolovsky

I'm the CTO and fonder of Tutorela and Limud Naim, one of Israel's established private tutoring marketplaces.

I've spent years building the technology that matches students with private tutors, and I've come to believe the match is the most important thing we do. A great tutor who is wrong for a particular student is still the wrong tutor. When the fit is right, the student shows up, keeps going and improves. When it's wrong, they quit after a lesson or two and decide tutoring doesn't work for them.

That makes matching an engineering problem, and it's the one I care about most. A good match is more than a subject and a price. It depends on the student's level and goals, how a tutor teaches, when both of them are free, and what has worked for similar students before. Our job is to turn all of that into a short list a family can trust, so they don't have to scroll through hundreds of profiles and guess.

The other half of my work is AI, and I think the future of tutoring is hybrid. A student learns best from a person who knows them, and AI on its own can't replace that. What AI can do is the work around the lesson: summarizing what was covered, suggesting practice, and helping the tutor prepare for the next session. At Tutorela we build for both, the human tutor at the center and AI working for them.

On this blog I write about how matching works behind the scenes, where AI helps in tutoring and where it doesn't, and what we learn as we build.