Onion Academy

Onion Academy (洋葱学园, formerly Onion Math) is a K-12 edtech company founded in 2013 by Yang Linfeng and team, positioning itself as a "learning experience design company" rather than a conventional online tutoring platform . The company built its early reputation on animated short-video courses for middle-school math, emphasizing self-directed learning through human-computer interaction rather than live-streamed lectures .

The company's evolution traces three phases: a "handicraft period" from 2013-2015 spent refining junior-high math content with meticulous production cycles; rapid expansion across all nine core subjects from 2016-2019; and more recently, integration of large-model AI capabilities to develop "AI private tutor" agents . Yang described the firm's core insight as exploiting a "potential energy gap" in education—using cognitive science and data-driven content design to make learning intrinsically motivating rather than a chore to be dispatched . The company has accumulated over 500 billion student interaction data points, which it uses to refine lesson pacing and conceptual clarity .

FreeS Fund (峰瑞资本) participated in every funding round from Series A through D, with other investors including Legend Capital, Tencent, and春华资本 . As of 2019, the company had raised over 600 million RMB cumulatively . During COVID-19, Onion Academy made its core curriculum freely available to schools nationwide, accepting near-zero revenue for several months .