Amid the ongoing war, Ukrainian edtech startup Preply, a global e-learning powerhouse, has scored $50 million in Series C funding. With this round, the total investment poured into the company since its debut accounts for over $100 million.
Largest investment round!
This record-breaking round in the company’s funding history was led by Silicon Valley-based Owl Ventures, the largest Education Technology investor in the world. Also, previous investors Diligent Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Educapital, Evli Growth Partners, Przemyslaw Gacek, co-founder of Grupa Pracuj also participated along with new investors – Swisscom Ventures, and Orbit Capital.
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. 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 added, “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.”
Online language learning marketplace
The online language learning marketplace Preply was founded by Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn and Serge Lukyanov in 2012. Though Preply’s main offices are in the US and 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 Ukrainians crossing borders and grappling with a new language.
The Preply marketplace pairs hundreds of thousands of learners with more than 32,000 tutors teaching over 50 languages. 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.
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.
