Language learning app Speak nets $20M, doubles valuation | TechCrunch

AI-powered language learning app Speak is on tears.

CEO and co-founder Connor Zwick told TechCrunch that since launching in its initial market of South Korea in 2019, Speak has grown to over 10 million users. Its user base has doubled every year over the past five years, and Speak now has customers in over 40 countries.

Looking forward to seeing Speak Expansion continueInvestors are now pledging additional cash to the startup.

The company this week closed a $20 million Series B extension led by Buckley Ventures, with participation from OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, and LinkedIn executive chairman Jeff Weiner. The capital infusion brings Speck’s total raised amount to $84 million and doubles the startup’s valuation to half a billion dollars.

Speak was launched in 2014 by Zwick and Andrew Hsu, who met while studying in college. Thiel FellowshipIt’s designed to teach a language by letting users learn how to speak and practice repeating prepared lessons rather than memorizing vocabulary and grammar. In this way, it’s not all that different from Duolingo, especially since Duolingo’s New Generative AI FeaturesBut true to its namesake verbiage, Speak emphasizes verbalization above all else.

“Our core philosophy is to motivate users to speak as loudly as possible,” Zwick said. “Achieving fluency helps people build relationships, bridge cultures, and create economic opportunities. This remains the most important part of language learning for people, yet historically, the least supported through technology.”

Speak started with English, and has since launched lessons in Spanish, powered by speech recognition models trained on in-house data. The next step is French, but Zwick didn’t say when it would launch lessons for that.

Speak makes money by charging $20 per month or $99 per year for access to all of the app’s features, including review materials and one-time courses.

With a workforce of 75 people across offices in San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo and Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia), Speak’s near-to-long-term roadmap is to develop new models that provide better real-time feedback on tone and pronunciation, Zwick said.