Sue Khim

Sue Khim is co-founder and chief executive of Brilliant, a San Francisco, California-based company that teaches math and coding through short interactive lessons on the web and in apps. She has led it since October 2012, when she and her co-founders turned an earlier student finance startup into Brilliant.

Growing Up in Chicago, Illinois

Khim was born in South Korea, and her parents immigrated to the United States when she was 100 days old. She grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and went to public schools that she told Learning Stuff did not challenge her, so she spent much of her time alone with books and learned to manage her own time and interests.

Leaving the University of Chicago for Alltuition

She studied mathematics at the University of Chicago and planned to take the medical school entrance exam. When her family fell into financial trouble, she learned to program mostly because it paid well, then found she loved writing software that could solve a problem "once, and elegantly," she told iMore. "I wanted to spend my life doing something that would be of some service, something that had a shot at being meaningful to struggling but ambitious people like me," she said.

After her junior year she left school to start Alltuition with Sam Solomon and Silas Hundt. While researching student loans for her younger brother, she had found the same kind of loan priced at 11 percent by one lender and 5 percent by a credit union, so the team set out to publish comparable rates. Alltuition went through Chicago's Excelerate Labs accelerator and won a pitch competition at the LAUNCH conference in San Francisco, according to YesPress and her Learning Stuff interview.

Turning Alltuition Into Brilliant

At LAUNCH the founders met investor Chamath Palihapitiya, who told them a product capped at the roughly 22 million students who file the federal FAFSA financial aid form each year was too small for so talented a team, Khim recalled. In October 2012 they changed course and started Brilliant, at first an online community where math and science fans posed hard problems and explained their solutions to each other. Forbes included her on its 2012 30 Under 30 list for education.

Building the Koji AI Tutor at Brilliant

Brilliant has since become a paid learning service focused on math and coding, built around lessons where learners drag lines, change graphs and test ideas, and it is accredited by the schools commission of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, according to its about page. In May 2026 it launched Koji, an AI tutor that can see a learner's screen, notice wrong guesses and pauses, and mark up the lesson to help, according to Brilliant's launch post. On an Edtech Insiders episode in July 2026, Khim explained why Koji is designed to build critical thinking by asking questions and holding back answers.