St. Louis edtech startup sees explosive growth, plans campus-wide deployments of AI-powered platform

King of the Curve, founded by Heath Rutledge-Jukes (MD ’26), Andrew Paul McIntosh, and William Kelly, has won the ‘Startups on Fire – Firms under five years old’ award at the 2025 Fire Awards presented by St. Louis Inno. The test prep company was featured in this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list and won the WashU Global Impact Award in 2023.

The feature below was written by Samir Knox and published in the St. Louis Business Journal on July 10, 2025.

Startups on Fire – Firms under five years old

Winner: King of the Curve

Locally-based online test prep firm King of the Curve is continuing to grow its user base, which has expanded to more than 500,000 students. While declining to share specific figures, the firm says 2024 saw revenue greater than its first three years in business combined. The company was also featured in this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Education list.

The company uses machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to customize education tools to fit students’ education styles and institutions’ teaching styles. Currently with seven full-time employees, the company is actively hiring software developers, marketers and part-time interns, it said.

The company was also the winner of St. Louis Inno’s 2025 Inno Madness competition.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

What was your company’s biggest achievement this past year? Our biggest milestone was transforming from a mobile-first app into a full-scale adaptive learning system. We launched a robust web platform, expanded into campus-wide deployments, and integrated live-learning diagnostics powered by machine learning and AI. Our platform tracks 100+ behavioral signals per user, from pacing to friction zones, and adjusts dynamically to support learning outcomes in real time. This evolution has made our product not just a student tool but also a system that empowers educators with unprecedented visibility into student performance.

What is your company’s biggest goal next year? Our primary goal is to accelerate institutional adoption and strengthen our presence within colleges and universities. We are moving beyond early-stage pilots and into full-scale campus-wide rollouts, with the aim of becoming the adaptive learning infrastructure schools rely on to personalize education and improve outcomes. As more institutions come on board, our system becomes more intelligent. Each new cohort sharpens our learning models, improves the timing of interventions, and enhances student performance analytics. The momentum is no longer theoretical. It is operational, and we are focused on compounding that institutional trust and long-term impact.

Are you currently hiring? If so, what roles? Yes, we are actively hiring to support our next phase of growth. We are looking for full-time software developers to help advance our adaptive learning platform, with an emphasis on real-time intelligence, machine learning, and AI-driven personalization. On the growth side, we are hiring marketers to lead initiatives in content creation, video production, short-form editing, acquisition strategy, and institutional outreach. We are also bringing on part-time growth interns who are passionate about student engagement, digital campaigns, and helping scale a mission-driven education company.