Language learning app Speak raises $20 million, doubling its valuation.

AI-powered language learning app Speak is hot.
Language learning app Speak raises $20 million, doubling its valuation.

AI-powered language learning app Speak is hot.

Since its launch in its first market of South Korea in 2019, speak has grown to over 10 million users, said CEO and co-founder Connor Zwick speaking with TechCrunch. Its user base doubled every year for the last five years, and today speak has customers from more than 40 countries.

Investors are hungry to see the trend continue at Speak, and so they're throwing more cash towards the startup.

The firm closed an extension round for $20 million in Series B funding this week, led by Buckley Ventures. For good measure, the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham and LinkedIn executive chairman Jeff Weiner all chipped in too. It brings the total cash raised for Speak up to $84 million, with the valuation on the startup doubling to half-a-billion dollars.

Speak is a language learning product, started in 2014 by Zwick and Andrew Hsu, who met while at the Thiel Fellowship. It teaches language to users by learning speaking patterns and practicing repetition in crafted lessons rather than memorizing vocabulary and grammar. So it's not really dissimilar from Duolingo, especially Duolingo's newer generative AI features. But true to its namesake verb, Speak emphasizes verbalizing above all else.

Our core philosophy is centered on getting people speaking out loud as much as possible," said Zwick. "Achieving fluency helps people form relationships, connect cultures and create economic opportunity. It's to date the most crucial piece of language learning for people yet historically, the least supported through technology.".

Speak started with English and has since added classes in Spanish, which are powered by a speech recognition model that was trained on house data. French is next, but Zwick wouldn't say when it plans to launch lessons for that language.

Speak makes money by charging $20 a month, or $99 a year, for all of the app's features, including review materials and one-off courses.

With a 75-employee workforce spread across offices in San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, and Ljubljana-the capital of Slovenia-the near-to-long-term roadmap for Speak is developing new models that deliver better real-time feedback on tone and pronunciation," said Zwick.

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2024-10-14 17:55:48