What began as a struggle to understand university lectures in a foreign language has grown into a technology business serving learners in more than 100 countries.
Hamza Kyamanywa, a 27-year-old Ugandan entrepreneur based in South Korea, is the founder of HoverNotes, an artificial intelligence-powered learning platform designed to turn lecture videos into organised study notes.
Kyamanywa developed the service after experiencing first-hand the difficulties of studying in Korean while pursuing electrical engineering at Korea University.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he spent hours replaying recorded lectures, trying to understand the language while simultaneously identifying the most important points for his notes.
“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.”
That experience eventually became the foundation for HoverNotes.
Launched in beta in November 2024, the service has grown to attract users in more than 100 countries. Its Chrome Web Store listing records about 20,000 users, while more than 600 customers have subscribed to its paid services.
The startup generated more than US$10,000 in gross revenue in June, according to Kyamanywa.
HoverNotes uses AI to analyse both the spoken and visual components of online lectures. It can identify information contained in slides, diagrams, programming code and demonstrations while connecting it with the lecturer’s spoken explanations.
The service supports more than 20 major languages, allowing users to produce notes in a language different from that used in the original lecture.
“People don’t write down everything during a lecture,” Kyamanywa told 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 service is designed to work with videos hosted on different websites, rather than being limited to a single learning platform.
Kyamanywa has also opted to keep users’ notes on their own computers instead of storing them on cloud servers, saying study records should remain under the control of their owners.
Kyamanywa arrived in South Korea in 2018 through the Korean Government Scholarship Program.
He first spent a year studying Korean at Sun Moon University before joining Korea University to pursue electrical engineering.
For a Ugandan student adapting to a new country and language, the transition was challenging. He also had to adjust to unfamiliar food and South Korea’s four distinct seasons.
Despite the challenges, he performed well academically and received several academic excellence awards.
He also remained closely connected to his family in Uganda, sending part of his scholarship allowance home and continuing to pay tuition for his two younger brothers.
To supplement his income, he worked as an extra in Korean films and television productions while studying.
His career later moved into technology.
Although he had studied electrical engineering, Kyamanywa taught himself programming and coding and joined a Seoul-based IT company before completing university.
He worked there for three years as a software developer.
It was during this period that his idea for an AI-powered learning tool continued to develop.
“I always start with the problem,” he said. “AI is just a tool.”
From employee to founder
Entrepreneurship was not initially part of Kyamanywa’s plans.
However, after his employer downsized, he accepted an offer to leave the company and used his severance payment to cover his living expenses while concentrating on HoverNotes.
He had already incorporated the startup in the United States, a move that made it easier to access international payment systems and serve customers globally.
Working largely alone, Kyamanywa took responsibility for developing the technology, setting up payment systems, responding to customers and dealing with administrative and legal requirements.
His former employer also played a role in shaping his entrepreneurial thinking by recommending books and essays aimed at startup founders, including works by investor and entrepreneur Paul Graham.
Kyamanywa said those materials helped him develop the mindset required to build a company.
The first paying customer arrived in November 2024.
The service initially charged users according to the amount of content they processed. When Kyamanywa realised the first customer was close to exhausting her usage allowance, he began coding an update that would give her additional free credits.
Before he could complete the update, the customer bought additional usage.
“I was shocked,” he said, recalling the moment as an early sign that the service was solving a genuine problem.
Choosing independence
Despite HoverNotes’ growth, Kyamanywa is not rushing to bring in external investors.
He argues that outside funding can sometimes restrict a founder’s freedom to determine the direction of a company and can create pressure for short-term results.
For now, he says revenue from the business is sufficient to finance its continued development.
His ambition is to expand HoverNotes beyond note-taking and build a comprehensive AI learning platform.
Future features could include real-time speech translation and tools to help learners understand, memorise and review educational material more effectively.
Kyamanywa is also involved in the wider artificial intelligence industry. He works as an AI engineering contractor for xAI, evaluating the performance of AI models.
He sees AI not simply as a technology for automating existing jobs but as a tool that could make entrepreneurship more accessible.
“AI made it possible for me to start a company without investors, co-founders or employees,” he said. “As the company grows, I’ll eventually hire people. AI will create more startups and, in turn, more jobs.”
Kyamanywa’s work extends beyond his technology ventures.
As the recently elected president of the Ugandans in South Korea Association, he has created a website aimed at preserving useful information for Ugandans living in the country.
The platform includes practical information on matters such as visas and everyday experiences, with the goal of helping future Ugandan arrivals learn from those who have already lived in South Korea.
He also intends to improve communication between the Ugandan community and the country’s embassy in Japan, which handles consular services for Ugandan nationals in South Korea.
Another initiative, JonjaBird, focuses on foreign inmates in South Korean correctional facilities.
The service helps inmates exchange letters with relatives overseas by scanning handwritten letters and forwarding them to family members through WhatsApp. Responses are printed and returned to the correctional facilities.
The name JonjaBird combines “jeonja”, the Korean word for electronic, with the image of a bird carrying messages.
Kyamanywa said the initiative was motivated by the belief that incarceration should not completely cut people off from their families.
Looking back, he credits the Korean Government Scholarship Program with giving him the foundation to pursue his education, technology career and entrepreneurial ambitions.
He also hopes his work and business activities will enable him to contribute to South Korea, including through taxation.
For Kyamanywa, the central lesson from his journey is that technology should begin with a real-world problem.
His ambition is now much broader than building a successful AI company.
“For the next 50 years, I want to spend my life finding problems in the world and building solutions that help people,” he said.
