A free mock exam with only 1,000 spots: how Medly sold AI practice into exam seasons in four countries

Two people from a London medical school built an AI revision app: questions follow exam specs, answers are marked point by point against the official rubric, and it guides rather than handing over answers. It already has 400k students in the UK, raised $8M in 2026 August, and hit Google Play the same week. In late October it was getting two to three thousand installs a day on Play. It looks like a new product, but it's an established brand carrying a fixed playbook into new markets: run a free national mock first, then recruit student creators to promote it, timed to exams in Australia, Brazil and the US. Below: what it is, where the volume came from, how it makes money, who it competes with, and what you can take away.

A "NEW MEDLY MOCKS!!" video with 4.65M views

In 2026 Sep 20, Australian student creator pragyakhanal posted on TikTok. The caption lays it out: "Medly Mocks is a free national mock exam 🇦🇺 for VCE, HSC and QCAA students. You get personalised analysis, a weak-spot study plan, and on results day your score and national ranking 📊 ⚠️ Only 1,000 spots! 📅 First exam: Sep 28." It has 110k views.

Two days later another account, aaspxo, posted with just "NEW MEDLY MOCKS!!" tagged #year12, 4.65M views. The same week, daniel.laww (550k views) wrote "completely free, reviewed by qualified examiners, only 1000 spots", and oliviaechristopher (780k views) posted only a sign-up link, medlyai.com/au/mocks. On Sep 28, study_with_simm added: "fewer than 100 spots left, book now." (TikTok view counts, 11-06 check)

The sign-up page matches the videos: Sep 28 to Oct 2, biology, chemistry, physics and maths papers under real VCE, HSC and QCAA exam conditions; each paper open for 24 hours; on results day you get an estimated grade, a breakdown of marks lost by topic, question-by-question explanations, and a ranking against students nationwide. A small line in the fine print shows the design's real purpose: papers you miss lock until results day, and resitting them requires Medly Pro.

That's the Medly playbook. It was used in the UK (2025 April, a study_with_kate video about the Medly mock, 4.4M views), in the US for the SAT, in Australia, and in October it moved to Brazil.

What it actually is

A revision and tutoring app organised around exam boards. It covers the UK's GCSE, A-Level and IB, the US's AP, SAT and ACT, Australia's HSC and VCE, and Brazil's ENEM. You pick an exam and subject and work through questions in the style of real papers. You can answer by typing, handwriting or photographing your work. It marks against the rubric point by point, showing where you earned and lost marks (the store page says "Your points, explained"). When you get stuck, the AI walks you through the steps instead of giving the full answer. There are also textbooks, flashcards and full mock exams.

It was built by Dr Paul Jung and Dr Kavi Samra, who have been friends since Year 7 and later both studied medicine at UCL before leaving the NHS to start it (UCL News, 2026-09-08). The rough timeline:

• 2023-09: posted on r/GCSE on Reddit asking users to "tell us if it sucks", a cold start;
• 2024-10: iOS launch; 2025-02 raised £1.7M, with about 30k students at the time;
• 2025: the free UK national mock Medly Mocks launched, and from summer they pushed the SAT on TikTok;
• 2026-08-13: Android launch; 8-19 announced a $8M seed round led by Felix Capital, 400k+ UK users, and plans to go global (UKTN);
• around the same time they published an independent randomised controlled trial: 929 GCSE science students, with 22% higher scores using Medly (reported by ETIH).

One easy-to-miss detail: the same app gets a different name and description in each country. The US iOS store listing is "Medly - Ace AP", the Brazil listing is "Medly: Enem e Universidade". One codebase, dressed up in the stores as four local products for four exam markets.

How the Play numbers grew

Google Play cumulative installs (third-party estimates plus self-reported): 9-26 about 570,10-22, about 4,800,10-26, about 12.7k, 11-02 about 25.5k, 11-06 is 28,637. Until 23 October it ran at tens to hundreds a day; from 10-23 it jumped to 1,500–3,400 a day, then fell back to 700–900 a day in early November.

The charts show where the money went:

never charted in Top Grossing, and never charted in the US category chart either.

Brazil is the main driver this wave, my read. From Sep 24 to Oct 28, a batch of Brazilian study creators posted Medly videos, all tagged ad or publi, each with a numbered code: #MEDLYAIBRA01 through #MEDLYAIBRA24. estudatati's "(ad) this is my secret!" video carries #simuladoenem and got 89K views; estudandocomcarla had one at 1.72M. One code per creator, payout per code: a textbook micro-influencer campaign. Medly's Facebook page was also pushing "October 10 and 11 free ENEM mock exams." Ad timing, Brazil chart entry, and the Play 10-23 climb all line up.

The steady UK line is most likely existing users moving over (inferred). The 400k UK students previously could only use the web app and iPhone, so once Android launched some of them would naturally have followed.

Malaysia spiked to #10 and dropped quickly, which looks like a school activity or a one-off promotion (many Malaysian students sit IGCSE). I didn't find the cause.

Play doesn't report installs by country, so I can't tell how much came from Brazil versus Australia. I also found no quantifiable evidence of paid ads: there are promo videos on Facebook, but I can't see how big the spend was.

Where users come from: a machine built from a "mock + student creators"

Broken down, there are five parts, and the first two matter most.

1. Free national mock. Free, capped at 1,000 spots, a fixed exam day, a fixed results day, and national rankings. It does three things at once: it creates urgency, it gets participants to share their results themselves, and it demonstrates the "marked against the rubric" selling point at the moment students care most. The sign-up page says 20k+ people have already taken it.
2. Student creators, and a matrix. In the UK there's study_with_kate (188k followers) and tillystudytips (160k followers); in the US, satpreptutor (260k followers); in Brazil, the 24 numbered codes. During the US SAT season a batch of small accounts with only a few dozen followers and uniform styles appeared, such as medly.maddy and study_with_gab, which looks like an internal or hired content matrix. On LinkedIn Medly is hiring a "Content Creator", and a job board lists a "Medly university campus ambassador" with a £50 activity budget. The official @medlyai account has only 7,451 followers, so most of the views come from other people's accounts.
3. Endorsements. A randomised controlled trial, UCL and funding news, UK Department for Education grants, edtech awards. These are aimed at parents and schools, and so is the "doesn't give you the answer" positioning.
4. SEO. The website has country subsites (/uk, /us, /au, /br) and a lot of blog content. The top UK revision site Save My Exams wrote a post titled "Save My Exams vs Medly AI", which suggests Medly is already rattling rivals in UK search.
5. Exam-season timing. 9–November overlaps Australia's HSC/VCE, Brazil's ENEM (November), the US SAT in November, and the UK autumn mocks. Medly enters each market four to eight weeks before the exam.

Where the money comes from

The free tier caps how many questions you can do each day. A UK user on Trustpilot said it was "three questions a day" and that for a 15–16-year-old the membership is "too expensive to afford" (2026-09-20). The official response is a free full subject every Monday (Medly Mondays), plus a monthly bursary.

Membership prices vary by market. UK: £24.99 a month, or £16 a month billed annually (ETIH). US website: $49.99 a month, or $29.99 a month billed annually, $359.88 a year. In-app purchases on Play run from $7.99 to $334.99; the October 29 cap was raised from $179.88 to $334.99. In 2025 August a TikTok video captioned only "but it's really expensive 😢" got 54k views.

Revenue isn't public. This price level, plus the design where resitting a missed paper after results day requires Pro, shows they planned from the start to charge parents for study support, not charge students a few pounds.

What users say

On Trustpilot it has a 4.2 rating, and the reviews since October are specific, both good and bad.

The good: "it took my chemistry from 1 to 9, unreal" (10-17; GCSE grades run 1–9, with 9 the top); "best revision app, the AI doesn't just give you the answer, it walks you through getting it right" (9-20).

The bad clusters around two things, and those are exactly its selling points:

• Marking isn't accurate enough: "marking on long-answer questions is inconsistent, I put a model answer in and it still wouldn't give a high mark" (10-20); "the AI sometimes just gives the answer, and makes mistakes that would lose marks in a real exam, and it doesn't stick to the rubric much... £20 a month, I'd like it to be more reliable" (11-02, paying user).
• Not enough questions, not enough coverage: "only 11 to 40 questions per topic, not enough" (10-17); "very few A-Level subjects, not even English Literature, and few exam boards" (10-30).

Translated into product requirements: going deep on one exam is worth more than spreading across ten. Every extra exam board or subject means another question bank and rubric, and Medly's replies keep saying "we're a small team, expanding subjects takes time".

Who it's competing with

AI exam prep is already crowded. Medly holds its ground with curriculum × marking rubrics × full mock exams, plus a distribution machine that runs events and works with creators. That 8M dollars is what lets it run in four countries at once.

If it were you

B: You can try this, but not where it's already active. The UK, US, Australia and Brazil are all places where Medly has money, brand and a full creator network, so following it there is hard. What you can take is its playbook, and the exams it hasn't reached and won't reach soon.

Who it's for: teams who have sat a high-stakes exam themselves, or who know a teacher that does. Think Turkey's YKS, Indonesia's UTBK, Nigeria's WAEC/JAMB, Vietnam's national high school exam, India's state-level exams, South Korea's Suneung, or a smaller country's end-of-school exam. You need to build a question bank that matches the official marking criteria, and you need to speak the local students' language.

Who it's not for: anyone building a general-purpose AI study assistant (that's ChatGPT and Gauth's turf); anyone who can't get accurate marking (that's where the bad reviews pile up, because one wrong grade and parents stop renewing); anyone counting on organic App Store traffic (in this business, traffic comes from events and creators).

How to build it: pick one exam and two or three of its most-taken subjects, and go deep on the question bank and marking criteria. Marking has to be accurate enough to explain every mark. The free tier gives enough to be useful; paid sells full mock exams, weak-spot plans and parent reports. Name the store page after the exam, like "Medly: Enem e Universidade".

How to acquire users: copy its mock exam approach. Four to eight weeks before the big exam, run a free national mock with limited seats, a fixed sitting time, results on a fixed day and a national ranking. Put missed-sitting retakes and full analysis behind the paywall. Sign 20 local study creators, each with a tracking code and paid per code, and recruit a few university students as ambassadors. Results day is when conversion and resharing peak.

When to start: it depends on the exam. If the next official sitting is less than four weeks away, skip this season. Build the question bank properly and enter the next season two months early.

Signs you've got it wrong: (1) your first free mock doesn't fill its seats, or nobody posts their results afterward, which means students in this exam don't respond to a national ranking and the hook doesn't work; (2) paid conversion stays negligible a month after the exam, which means local parents won't pay for a study app and you're stuck selling through schools; (3) Medly or a big local tutoring company launches the same thing for your exam, and the window closes. On the other hand, if Medly's daily Play installs stay above a few hundred after the November exam season ends, it's more than a seasonal spike, retention in this category is better than it looks, and a bigger bet is worth making.

Data and sources

• Installs and charts: estimated daily installs from Google Play third-party data, and Education free chart, 9-26 to 11-06; store page copy read from the US store.
• iOS: iTunes lookup, UK store 4,929 ratings at 4.72 stars, US store 75 ratings (11-06).
• Company and funding: UCL news 2026-09-08, UKTN 2026-08-19, ETIH (randomised controlled trial and UK pricing), dealroom.
• Mock exams and creators: medlyai.com/au/mocks (read 11-06); TikTok @pragyakhanal, @aaspxo, @daniel.laww, @oliviaechristopher, @study_with_simm, @study_with_kate, @estudatati, @tinpssss; view counts checked 11-06.
• Pricing: medlyai.com/us (search snippets), ETIH; Play in-app purchase ranges from store page records.
• User reviews: Trustpilot medlyai.com, 2026-09 to November.
• Where it says "inferred" or "not found", that's an inference or something I couldn't find.