A Ugandan entrepreneur who struggled to keep up with Korean-language university lectures has turned that challenge into an artificial intelligence startup whose note-taking innovation, HoverNotes, is now used by learners in more than 100 countries.
Hamza Kyamanywa, 27, developed HoverNotes while studying electrical engineering at Korea University in South Korea. The platform uses AI to analyse recorded lectures and automatically produce structured study notes from both what a lecturer says and what appears on screen. That distinction is central to how HoverNotes works.
Most transcription services primarily convert spoken words into text, which can leave out information contained in presentation slides, diagrams, mathematical workings, computer code or physical demonstrations. HoverNotes analyses the audio and visual components together and organises the information into notes intended for revision rather than producing a word-for-word transcript.
“People don’t write down everything during a lecture,” Kyamanywa told South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency. “They pick out the important points and organize them so they’re easier to review later. HoverNotes works the same way.”
The platform can generate notes in more than 20 major languages. A student watching a lecture delivered in Korean, for example, can produce notes in English, while an English-language lecture can be processed into Korean or another supported language. For Kyamanywa, that capability grew directly from his own experience as an international student.
The idea took shape during the COVID-19 pandemic, when university teaching shifted heavily online. Studying engineering in Korean meant he frequently had to replay recorded lectures to understand both the technical material and the language being used to explain it.
“It was exhausting,” he said. “That’s when I started thinking about whether AI could make the process of understanding lectures and taking notes much easier.” What began as a solution to a personal academic problem eventually developed into a commercial product.
HoverNotes entered beta in November 2024 and has since attracted users in more than 100 countries. Its listing on the Chrome Web Store shows about 20,000 users, while the company has grown to more than 600 paying subscribers. The business is also beginning to generate revenue.
Kyamanywa said HoverNotes recorded more than $10,000 in gross revenue in June, an important milestone for a young education technology company still building its customer base. The figures give the startup an international reach unusual for an early-stage African-founded technology product. Unlike businesses that must establish physical operations in individual markets before expanding, software platforms can acquire customers globally from an early stage if they solve a problem shared across countries.
HoverNotes is targeting one such problem. Recorded lectures, online courses and video-based learning have become common across universities and professional education, but students still have to process large amounts of information presented simultaneously through speech, text and visuals.
The rapid adoption of generative AI has produced numerous tools capable of summarising documents, transcribing meetings and answering questions from uploaded material. Kyamanywa is positioning HoverNotes more narrowly around learning, with lecture comprehension and structured note-taking at the centre of the product. The startup has also taken a different approach to storing users’ academic material.
Rather than keeping study notes on its cloud servers, HoverNotes saves them directly on the user’s computer as portable text files. That gives students greater control over their notes and reduces the amount of personal study material retained by the platform. Kyamanywa’s journey adds to a growing group of African technology founders building products for customers well beyond their home markets. It is particularly notable because HoverNotes was developed from an African student’s experience studying in Asia, rather than from a problem confined to Uganda.
South Korea has become an important technology and research destination for international students, while its universities operate within one of the world’s most advanced digital economies. Building HoverNotes from that environment gave Kyamanywa access to a technologically sophisticated market while his own experience as a foreign student exposed a problem that could be found in classrooms far beyond Korea.
The next challenge will be converting HoverNotes’ international user base into a larger sustainable business. AI services face significant computing costs, fast-moving competition and growing scrutiny over accuracy, privacy and the handling of educational content. For Kyamanywa, however, the product has already travelled considerably further than the university classroom where the idea started.
A tool initially conceived to help him understand lectures in a foreign language is now being used by thousands of learners, across more than 100 countries, with paying customers and monthly revenue providing an early test of whether that global interest can be turned into a scalable African-founded technology company.
