Speak, a San Francisco, CA-based English language learning platform with AI-powered features, announced that it raised $27 million in Series B funding, bringing its total raised to over $47 million.
The round was led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with participation from Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Justin Mateen, Gokul Rajaram, and Founders Fund.
The new funds will be used to expand the engineering, machine learning, product, marketing, content, and operations departments at the company.
Speak is one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers, and "double-digit million" in annual recurring revenue.
It plans to expand to new languages and markets, including Japan, as well as invest in text-generating models such as OpenAI's GPT-3.
“The pandemic accelerated remote work and the expansion of global, distributed teams, meaning there’s even more demand for people around the world to speak the same language. It’s also driven demand for new solutions more oriented around remote or programmatic experiences as opposed to in-person instruction.” said, CEO of Speak, Connor Zwick. “Speak has remained fairly lean and has multiple years of runway enabling it to control its own destiny regardless of the fundraising environment over the next few years.”
In addition to the AI-guided practice sessions, Speak offers auto-renewing monthly and annual subscriptions that include access to courses, electives, and review content.
Company: Speakeasy Labs, Inc.
Raised: $27.0M
Round: Series B
Funding Month: November 2022
Lead Investors: OpenAI Startup Fund
Additional Investors: Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Justin Mateen, Gokul Rajaram, and Founders Fund
Company Website: https://www.speak.com/
Software Category: AI English Language Learning Platform
About the Company: Speak was founded in 2016 by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu, both of whom had an acute interest in AI from an early age. Speak is an AI English tutor that allows you to practice speaking English without the need for a live tutor on the other end. Speak has developed advanced conversational speech recognition systems to power the first conversational language learning experience that outperforms human tutors. It provides auto-renewing monthly and annual subscriptions that include access to courses, electives, and review content in addition to AI-guided practice sessions. Speak currently employs 40 people across offices in San Francisco (its headquarters), Seoul, and Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/17/speak-lands-investment-from-openai-to-expand-its-language-learning-platform/