ChatGPT, Google, Preply и коя е по-добрата търсачка
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Ukrainian startup Preply beats the geopolitical odds with $50M to grow its language learning platform
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As Ukraine continues to be battered by Russia in an unprovoked war that has sent hundreds of thousands of refugees scattering elsewhere, a language learning startup hatched by Ukrainians has found traction growing outside of the country — and today it’s announcing a round of funding to take its ambitions to the next level.
Preply, which has built a marketplace where language tutors and would-be students of different languages connect for online learning sessions, has closed a round of $50 million. This is a Series C, and Kirill Bigai — the now-Barcelona-based CEO who co-founded the company with Dmytro Voloshyn and Serge Lukyanov — said the startup will be using the funds to continue building the technology that it uses to run the platform, as well as to build out more specialized content for its tutors to use.
Owl Ventures, a specialist VC focusing on education, is leading the round, with past backers Diligent Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Educapital, Evli Growth Partners and other backers such as Przemyslaw Gacek, co-founder of Grupa Pracuj; Swisscom Ventures; and Orbit Capital.
Notably, it has raised about $100 million — $85 million of which has come in the last year; it’s been around since 2012 and has largely grown through bootstrapping. And while it’s not disclosing its valuation, PitchBook data puts the figure at just under $400 million post-money, a figure that the company did not dispute (nor confirm) when I put it to them earlier.
Bigai did note to me that the valuation was definitely at an “up round” compared to its previous raise — $35 million in 2021 — and that generally over the last several years it’s been growing. “I feel lucky that we have a strong business and business dynamics,” he said of the pressures in the current climate.
Preply (pronounced “Prep-lee”) does not disclose how many students it has except to note that they are in the “hundreds of thousands,” and it says that today there are some 32,000 tutors from 190 countries teaching over 50 languages. I should point out that in 2021 it said it had 40,000 tutors, but this is not a sign of the company business shrinking but of it simply tightening up and focusing on quality, as I understand it.
The company, as with most startups, is also fairly unspecific when it comes to talking about revenues: Bigai said it has not given year-over-year figures, but since 2019, he said the company has grown revenues and users more than 10x.
Building on the fact that its user base skews older than some other online learning platforms — the average age is 25-40 rather than students — it’s also been doubling down on a newer B2B2C business line, providing services to companies whose employees need or want to improve their skills in a particular language. Customers for that business include Bytedance (and specifically TikTok), Mercedes and McKinsey, and Bigai noted that this segment of the business has been growing even faster, albeit from a smaller base.
Preply’s germination, and its focus on “live” learning, comes out of the direct experiences of its founders. Bigai told me that he first came up with the idea for the company when living in Boston: he’d relocated from Kiev, having studied English for years in school, to build something. But it turned out that his on-paper knowledge of English had almost no relation to using it practically.
He quickly found a tutor to help him with conversation and learning the language in a more realistic way, and his lessons took place over Skype.
Eventually, he realized that this was the business he wanted to build: A way for people like him — older and already out of school — to really get to know a language and a way for them to find tutors more easily to do so.
One note on the company’s Ukraine roots: Bigai and the other founders relocated the company back to his home country to build it after that initial idea started in Boston. Then, over the years, eventually Bigai himself — and some of his staff — relocated elsewhere. About one-third of the company was still in Ukraine when the war kicked off earlier this year. Now about half of those people are still in the country, and the rest have also left. (Those that stayed are now mostly in the Western part of the country away from the most serious action; and some are actually fighting, too.)
Just as the company’s corporate profile has significantly evolved over the years, so too has its platform. Specifically, Bigai tells me that Preply uses machine learning algorithms to better match would-be students with teachers — parameters include matching people in compatible timezones and skills levels and desired outcomes — and those will be seeing investment to potentially become more advanced.
There will also be investment going into content. Today, most of the tutors, Bigai said, devise their own learning plans, although it has started to introduce more course materials to formalize what is learned and to set benchmarks for progress. These exist today in two languages, Spanish and English, which follows from the most popular languages on the platform (18% learn Spanish; 23% learn English). Other popular languages include French (10%), Arabic and Italian, and the plan, Bigai said, was to introduce more formal materials for these and other languages, too, over time.
On one level, Preply competes against the likes of Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise and other online education platforms geared helping people learning new languages; and on another level against the likes of GoStudent and any number of freelancer marketplaces (and word of mouth) for providing its learning by way of actual human tutors who connect with students over streamed video, typically one-to-one, lessons.
Preply up to now has been a lot looser than any of these, giving a lot of license both to tutors in terms of what they teach and even what they charge. However, with the company intent on going head to head with all of them in hopes of getting a bigger piece of the lucrative language learning market — worth $47 billion by 2025 — I suspect that introducing more formal parameters in terms of what is taught gives a hint that perhaps some of the other aspects will be getting more formalized, too.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Preply on their next phase of growth,” said Ross Darwin, principal at Owl Ventures, in a statement. “We’re particularly excited by the continued momentum of the consumer business as well as its new language learning offering for companies, increasingly reliant on international workforces.”
Ukrainian Business Preply Builds Online Learning Marketplace
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Ukrainian-founded Preply reached a record-breaking milestone in the company’s funding history today, raising $50 million USD in its series C, amassing more than USD $100 million in investments since inception.
Despite the war in Ukraine, founders Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn and Serge Lukyanov have succeeded in building a truly global business, expanding the team to over 400 employees of 58 different nationalities across 30 countries worldwide. From an education startup, Preply has become a global e-learning powerhouse that connects the world’s largest live language learning community.
Ukrainian Business Preply Builds Online Learning Marketplace
The Series C round was led by Silicon Valley based Owl Ventures, the largest Education Technology investor in the world. Previous investors Diligent Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Educapital, Evli Growth Partners, Przemyslaw Gacek, co-founder of Grupa Pracuj also participated, as well as new investors such as Swisscom Ventures, and Orbit Capital.
What is Preply?
Preply is a massive online language learning marketplace connecting over 32,000 tutors teaching 50 languages to hundreds of thousands of learners in 180 countries worldwide. With student-tutor matches being suggested through a machine-learning algorithm, recommended tutors create customized lesson plans to suit the learner’s budget, schedule, and current knowledge.
Preply was founded in 2012 by the Ukrainian team of Kirill Bigai, Serge Lukyanov, and Dmytro Voloshyn. Today, the company has over 400 employees of 58 different nationalities. Preply is a US company with employees based in 30 countries across Europe, USA, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Preply’s Growth and the Market Trajectory
The Preply marketplace pairs hundreds of thousands of learners with more than 32,000 tutors teaching over 50 languages. Over the past year, Preply has tripled the size of its B2B language learning business which now counts Bytedance (Tiktok), Mercedes and McKinsey amongst its customers.
On the consumer side, the number of people using the Preply app has grown 4x over the last two years and in many geographies overall users have almost doubled year on year.
The number of students being taught on the platform now exceeds the number of students taught in Ivy League universities as the platform plans to conquer the growing online language learning market, set to reach $47 billion by 2025.
Kirill Bigai, Co-founder and CEO of Preply, said, “I am indescribably proud of what the Preply team has achieved. We have become the world’s leading brand in live language classes and the platform of choice for so many tutors who have decided to teach online”.
He added: “With the additional funding, we plan to continue growing our footprint in the US and Europe by doubling down on AI-based matching and delivering on our promise to connect the largest live language learning community in the world.”
Ross Darwin, Principal at Owl Ventures said: “We’re thrilled to partner with Preply on their next phase of growth. We’re particularly excited by the continued momentum of the consumer business as well as its new language learning offering for companies, increasingly reliant on international workforces.”
Preply in Ireland
Around 230 Preply tutors were born in Ireland. However, the majority of Irish tutors are members of Ireland’s large diaspora, with 59% of them teaching from another country, such as Spain, the UK, Thailand, Italy, France, or Vietnam.
Their students come from a variety of places, from Italy to Brazil, Russia to Spain, and Poland to France. Over 100 nationalities are currently being taught by Irish tutors. One Irish tutor even had 137 students on Preply in 2021 alone.
Supporting Ukraine through business
Though Preply’s main offices are in the U.S. & Europe, the founders hail from Kyiv. Over the last few months, the company’s global workforce have launched a number of meaningful initiatives to support Ukraine.
This includes a ‘Messages to Ukraine’ campaign, translating over 8000 global messages of support into Ukrainian, as well as a free language assistance program for 1000 Ukrainian refugees grappling with a new language.
Preply Language App Says Pandemic Tripled Online Users
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At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic more than two years ago, schools resorted to distance learning to continue operations. As the number of cases continues to decrease and many schools are going back to in-person or hybrid learning, a Massachusetts-based educational app studying user patterns during the pandemic found its online learning business tripled, and it doesn’t expect demand to fall back to pre-pandemic levels any time soon, if ever.The language learning app Preply recently unveiled its annual report analyzing the study habits of its more than 200,000 students and 40,000-plus tutor database to understand how people were learning between Jan. 1 through Dec. 15 last year. The app takes students through self-guided activities, incorporating one-on-one sessions with tutors based in 160 countries. Using a machine learning algorithm, Preply suggests tutors based on several metrics, including subject matter, the user’s native language, time zones and learning goals, among others.The report revealed that use of the Preply online learning tool grew by “leaps and bounds,” saying kids turned to the service when in-person learning was shut down for some time. From October 2019 to March 2020 when the pandemic took hold, the number of users doubled. A month later, by April, that number nearly tripled, according to the report. Fast forward to September 2020, and Preply said it saw nearly a tenfold increase in new monthly learners. The company added that in January 2021, it reached an all-time high of new monthly learners. The report continued by saying that as COVID-19 vaccines rolled out and restrictions loosened, new learners declined. Despite the drop, by August 2021, new enrollments held steady at three times the amount of the October 2019, pre-pandemic baseline.“Prior to the pandemic, e-learning was becoming increasingly popular, but COVID-19 lockdowns significantly propelled its growth,” Chief Executive Officer Kirill Bigai, who co-founded Preply in 2013, toldin an email. Bigai said the pandemic shifted how people live and approach work, with many people now working remotely full time. “This is a trend we’re seeing,” he said.When it comes to choosing a tutor, the report says learners counted experience as the most important factor, with 42 percent of users looking specifically for that. Some 34 percent to 59 percent of users were concerned about budget-friendly teachers, and another 28 percent to 40 percent looked for tutors with qualities like kindness, patience and friendliness. Only 20 percent of users requested tutors whose native language was the same as the target language, and 19 percent chose tutors based on their location. Other aspects of the tutor that users deemed relevant to their selection included teaching styles (11 percent), educational background or certifications (10 percent), professional demeanor (9 percent) and being able to communicate clearly (8 percent).As for what the swelled number of new learners are studying, the Preply report said 26 percent of them chose to learn Spanish. The next most popular choices were English, French, Chinese and Japanese. Bigai said English being the second most popular language taught in the U.S. was “a demand generated by relocators, expats and foreign students in-market.” Based on findings in the report, Bigai believes that trends toward online learning will continue.“We believe that by incorporating a mix of virtual human interaction and proprietary self-guided learning activities, we can maximize tutor and student effectiveness, and ultimately create the quickest and most effective way to learn any language,” he said. “The pandemic was an incredible boost to the e-learning business and we’re confident that the global demand for online language learning is here to stay.”
Ukrainian Founded Startup Preply Delivers 5,000+ “Messages of Hope”
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The online language learning platform translated thousands of
messages in 84 languages from people in 115 countries worldwide
NEW YORK, NY — March 28, 2022 — Global language tutoring platform, Preply, has launched “Messages for Ukraine,” a microsite that encourages people from all over the world to contribute messages of support to the people of Ukraine. More than 5,000 messages from 115 countries have been submitted in 84 different languages, all of which have been translated into Ukrainian. Preply curated the most powerful contributions to display on digital billboards in Warsaw’s central station in Poland this week, as well as displaying this message of solidarity on Warsaw’s iconic Spire Tower. Preply chose Poland since the country has welcomed more than two million* displaced Ukrainians since the start of the Russian invasion.
“Connecting with other human beings is arguably the greatest motivation to learn a foreign language. At Preply, we take pride in connecting language learners with tutors from every corner of the world,” said Kirill Bigai, co-founder and CEO of Preply who was born and raised in Kyiv. “This has been a truly devastating moment in history for the people of Ukraine and for the world. We are deeply committed to supporting Ukrainians — through both words and actions. With ‘Messages for Ukraine,’ we harnessed the power of language, community, and hope from around the globe.”
In addition to “Messages for Ukraine,” Preply has enacted several measures to support Ukrainians. First, Preply has waived the commission for Ukrainian tutors, in case they are able to keep earning money through Preply. The company is also playing its part in the economic isolation of Russia and has suspended Russia-based tutors from teaching on the platform. Finally, Preply published a glossary with Ukrainian words and phrases to support those who have been displaced, as well as an article about how the Ukrainian and Russian languages differ.
Preply was founded in 2013 by a trio of Ukrainian friends: Kirill Bigai (CEO), Serge Lukyanov (Head of Product Design), and Dmytro Voloshyn (CTO). Preply began developing a detailed contingency plan for employees living in Ukraine based on a number of different emergency scenarios. To date, Preply has helped relocate more than 140 employees and their family members to safer locations, including Western Ukraine and abroad to neighboring countries. Preply has provided these employees with advance salary payments, provision of additional emergency funds as well as assistance with housing accommodations.
*Source: BBC
About Preply
The online learning platform Preply brings thousands of learners and private teachers together digitally. The platform is based on 40,000 verified private teachers in over 50 languages and other subjects and an intelligent algorithm that matches learners with the most suitable teacher. Teachers then create individual lesson plans to fit each learner’s budget, schedule, and skill level. In this way, students from 150 countries have taken over two million lessons from teachers from 110 countries. Preply was founded in Ukraine in 2013 by Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn, and Serge Lukyanov. The company has since raised more than $51 million in investments and has more than 430 employees of over 53 nationalities across Spain, the U.S., and beyond.
Contact
Arianna Imperato
Intra PR | 347.224.9940 | [email protected]
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