Languages Tutoring App Preply Raised $50 Million
Ukraine-based Language tutoring application, Preply has recently announced raising $50 Million for scaling up the operations of its platform in a Series C funding round.
The leading investor in the deal is Owl Ventures with other backup investors such as Diligent Capital, Educapital, Hoxton Ventures, Evli Growth Partners, Przemyslow Gacek of Grupa Pacruj, Orbit Capital, and Swisscom Ventures. With this, the total investment amount raised to date becomes $101 Million.
About Languages Tutoring App Preply
Preply is a Multinational ed-tech company established in 2012 with its headquarters in Brookline, United States of America, however, it originated in Ukraine. The co-founders of the global learning platform, Preply are Kirill Bigai, Surge Lukyanov, and Dmytro Voloshyn.
Preply is popular for tutoring global languages to students worldwide, following a machine learning and AI-based algorithm. Languages tutored through Preply include English, German, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, and many more, currently featuring in more than 180 countries. Machine learning algorithm helps students to find compatible and matched tutors according to their specific conditions.
Learners can get personalized learning lessons specifically. It has a wide base of employees from over 58 nationalities and has lakhs of tutors onboarded on its platform. Learners can filter tutors according to their requirements such as price, language, etc, and get personal tutoring classes from the desired tutor. Preply provides a platform where learners and tutors across the world connect. For its emerging popularity, Preply won the “The revenue hack of 2020” award at an award show in Ukraine in May 2020. The actual annual revenue is not revealed by Preply, though it is growing faster than before.
The platform features a category called ”Corporate training” which helps employees of various companies and businesses to upgrade their skills and to achieve business-level language proficiency. Most of the learners enroll in learning English and Spanish languages. Preply started its operations in Ukraine, however, it shifted most of its operations to other countries afterward. The Ukraine-Russia war has also affected the ongoing operations of Preply in Ukraine. Some great competitors of Preply in the market are Cambly, Duolingo, GoStudents, Lingoda, and many more.
Kirill Bigai, Chief Executive Officer, Preply’s Statement
Kirill Bigai, Chief Executive Officer, Preply said that the company is going to update the platform with more formal learning techniques for learners. He has not revealed the exact valuation of Preply after this recent round, however, said that the value is surging comparatively. Kirill Bigai got the inspiration and idea of launching Preply and the specific learning methodology with his own story of learning English virtually.
He wanted to ease the process of finding tutors accordingly so that desired learners can learn different languages even after passing out from the educational institution. Bigai said that he feels proud of the achievement of Preply and praised the organization by adding that the company has achieved the benchmark to become leading language learning and educational start-up worldwide.
Preply will use the freshly raised $50 Million investment for growing its ongoing operations at a big pace and upgrading some learning, tutoring content, and techniques for the users. They will be focussing on maintaining the technology that is already in use such as Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence for worry-free operations. Enhancing content is the main focus of Preply for this funding round.
Coming to the investor in this $50 Million deal, the leading one here is Owl Ventures. Owl Ventures is an investment company based in San Francisco, California, United States of America, and is popular for investing in ed-tech start-ups worldwide. Ross Drawin of Owl Ventures said that they are thrilled to work with Preply and praised the momentum maintained by Preply for its feature of providing language tutoring to companies and for business purposes.
Talking about some of the backup investors, Diligent Capital Partners is a Ukraine-based private equity capital start-up, established in 2016. Educapital is a Europe-based Venture capital firm, founded in 2017 with its headquarters in Paris.
Hoxton Ventures is an investment company focussing on early-stage and seed funding rounds, located in the United Kingdom. Evli Growth Partners is also an investment firm located in Helsinki, Finland. Grupa Pacruj is a technology-based recruitment company in Europe. Orbit Capital was founded in 2019 as an investment organization in the Czech Republic. Lastly, Swisscom Ventures is a venture capital-based investment company based in Switzerland.
In addition to this $50 Million funding round, There are several other investments achieved by Preply. Some of them include a Series B round of $35.2 Million on March 9, 2021. The funding was primarily led by Owl Ventures and Full In Partners with several other backers. On 30 March 2020, Preply closed a series A funding round of $10 Million, having Hoxton Ventures as the chief investor with 8 other investors.
Preply is giving high competition to other language learning applications in the market with its highly productive machine-learning-based algorithm for learners and tutors. As their plan says, this new funding will bring some good and productive changes in their highly efficient working model.
