In 2014, Ivan Crewkov, with his family in tow, left Siberia to move to the U.S. because his startup, Cubic.AI, was about to launch a Kickstarter campaign for its smart speaker. A week before the campaign launch, Amazon announced its Echo smart speaker. Cubic.AI was done.

"It was a disaster," Crewkov says to TechCrunch. "There was no sense in fighting Amazon and Google; we sold the company [two years later].

Of course, it wasn't completely wasted time. Relocating his family from Siberia to the U.S. meant putting his daughters in English-speaking schools. One of them began working online with a tutor, while reading the scripted answers back, which made Crewkov realize that his next- and current-startup would be Buddy.ai.

I just realized that we could probably create an AI character that would do the same things if lessons are scripted, said Crewkov. My daughter struggled; she was our first tester and our first user.

Buddy.ai is an animated, multimodal, conversational character tutor to help kids learn their second language-English. The company works as a subscription app, downloadable in consumers' smartphones. It is now also partnering with schools in countries such as Brazil, among others.

Crewkov said knowing their background was in voice-based AI, "it wasn't easy to get the business off the ground." When they started, they thought they would be able to get the product to market within six months, a goal that Crewkov now refers to as "naive." Instead, it took years.

It targets children, meaning to navigate the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule, or COPPA, as well as similar laws around the world. And then there's the fact that it is a very tough problem to crack. To train an AI to be able to understand human voices, especially children speaking their native tongues, but which they would not fully speak yet in this case.

"We are trying to understand a 4-year-old Brazilian girl who is trying to say her first words in English at the same time as a 4-year-old Arabic girl from Saudi Arabia," Crewkov said. "Completely different accents and completely different languages. We just started collecting data in countries [where] there were no hardcore [regulations] like COPPA and trained the first model on that data."

And the company won, now it approaches 55 million downloads and partners with over 22 million students yearly.

Buddy.ai closed an $11 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures and One Way Ventures, J Ventures, Point72 Ventures, among other investors.

Crewkov said fundraising was never easy from the start for Buddy.ai, and with growing interest in AI, it was still not easy with this round. He said they spoke to 186 investors to close this seed round. BITKRAFT just happened to be the second firm he spoke to, and they were perfect, according to Crewkov, for what his company was doing.

"We were very interested in finding a fund that was knowledgeable in the gaming space and that is why we are so enamored with BITKRAFT," said Crewkov. "Kids treat Buddy like a game. An interesting statistic is that most of the downloads are actually from kids who just want to play around with buddy."

All capital will be invested into the development of the product. Crewkov said that even if a company is aged and with traction, he finds it pretty underdeveloped with the tech at hand so far. With this round, Buddy.ai is set to hire a head of game design and a head of UX design.

Crewkov added that a major push for the company is to add on additional languages and continue building relationships with schools.

Buddy.ai is not alone in the race to use AI characters to make practicing a new language easier. For example, Univerbal has raised $2 million in venture capital, and Loora has taken in $21.3 million. But Buddy.ai has a distinct advantage over its competition-a focus on children as English-language learners.

"We just believe that the future is hybrid where AI tutors and AI agents can really help teachers," said Crewkov. "You just need to provide a lot of practice, practice daily. We will never [have] enough teachers to do that; it's the prefect applications to AI."