AI Language Learning Startup Speak Raises $78M, Achieves Unicorn Status at $1B Valuation

AI-driven language learning startup Speak raises $78M at a $1B valuation

Speak, an AI-driven language learning startup, has secured a $78 million Series C round, bringing its valuation to $1 billion. Led by Accel and with participation from major backers, including OpenAI's Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures, and Y Combinator, this investment underscores the growing momentum in generative AI applications. Just six months ago, Speak had raised a $20 million Series B extension at a $500 million valuation. "Speak has emerged as a standout player in consumer AI, demonstrating exceptional growth and market potential," said Ben Quazzo, partner at Accel, who led the investment round and is joining Speak's Board of Directors. "With its strategic expansion into global and enterprise markets, coupled with effective, personalized language learning at scale and an experienced team, Speak is well-positioned to dominate this new category." Traditional language education often starts with reading and writing. Speak's platform flips this model by focusing on spoken conversation first -- mirroring how native speakers naturally learn. Using advanced AI tools, including OpenAI's speech technology and large language models, Speak generates real-time, voice-driven prompts and evaluates user responses to build fluency and confidence. No human tutors are involved; machine learning and generative AI power everything from speech recognition to feedback loops. With over 1.5 billion people seeking to learn English, Speak's initial target is massive. To date, it has focused on teaching English from eight originating languages. The new funding will expand the platform's language offerings to Spanish, French, and beyond, opening the door to a larger global customer base. Though Speak doesn't disclose active user counts, its app has been downloaded over 10 million times and has created 25 million personalized lessons for its users this year alone. The company reports daily usage of about 10-20 minutes per user. Subscription options run around $20 per month or $99 per year -- significantly cheaper than traditional tutoring. An enterprise tier, Speak for Business, currently serves over 200 corporate customers. Unlike some competitors, Speak does not yet integrate with standardized language tests, focusing instead on real-world conversational ability. While the platform may add more "behavioral" features in the future -- like subtle gamification to encourage practice -- efficacy remains the priority. In the long term, Speak's technology could evolve to provide more formal fluency assessments, but the goal is to maintain authenticity and effectiveness over test prep or gaming features. With fresh capital and deepening partnerships -- especially with OpenAI -- Speak aims to refine its AI-driven experience. It aims to become a fully dynamic learning experience powered by its underlying learning engine, the latest LLMs, and major advancements in its speech technology. As more language options and features roll out, the company aims to position itself as a leader in applying generative AI to language acquisition to reshape how people learn to speak new languages.

AI Language Startup Speak Hits Unicorn Status After Raising $78M Series C

Speak, a startup that wants to help people learn new languages through AI, raised a fresh $78 million Series C led by Accel -- doubling its valuation in fewer than six months and reaching unicorn status at a $1 billion valuation. It was just last June when the San Francisco-based startup announced a $20 million Series B extension at a $500 million valuation. Of course, such valuation jumps are nothing new for startups that include AI in their products. In Speak's case, the startup's platform generates audio conversations between the app and the user, and using AI helps improve users' fluency. The company said it has created more than 25 million personalized lessons for its users just this year, and since its previous funding round introduced its enterprise offering for employers. Existing investors in the new round include OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator among others. Founded in 2016, Speak has raised $162 million, per the company. "We are at an inflection point of a transformative shift in learning with AI," said co-founder and CEO Connor Zwick in a blog. "English isn't just a language; it's a key that unlocks life-changing opportunities from higher education and global careers to meaningful cross-cultural connections. We are energized by the opportunity to make personalized, AI-powered language tutoring accessible to millions of people worldwide." Speak is just the latest startup infusing AI into its application and raising big cash. Last week, investment platform Public raised $135 million in equity and debt financing as it looks to grow AI-enabled research features. So far this year, AI-related startups have raised more than $87 billion, according to Crunchbase data. That already far surpasses last year's total of less than $56 billion.

OpenAI backs $78M round for AI language learning startup Speak - SiliconANGLE

Speakeasy Labs Inc., a startup with an artificial intelligence app that helps users learn English, today announced that it has raised $78 million in funding. Accel led the Series C investment. It was joined by OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator and other returning backers. Speak is now valued at $1 billion, double what it was worth following a $20 raise million in June. "So far this year, users have already spoken more than one billion sentences with Speak," Speak co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Connor Zwick detailed in a blog post. "And in 2025, we plan to bring Speak to many, many more countries." Speak's namesake mobile app enables users to learn English by engaging in conversations with an AI voice. The software analyzes the user's responses and provides linguistic feedback. According to Speak, its approach enables consumers to practice more than 1,100 phrases within a week of signing up. The company offers an enterprise edition of its app, Speak for Business, that provides additional features. There are language courses geared towards users with varying levels of proficiency. The app also makes it possible to practice specific business conversations, such as discussions with suppliers and customers. One of the latest additions to Speak's feature set, Live Roleplays, rolled out a few weeks ago. It automatically adjusts the AI voice's sentence patterns and vocabulary based on the user's proficiency level. Additionally, the feature displays study goals and language hints to keep the learning process flowing smoothly. Under the hood, Live Roleplays is powered by OpenAI's Realtime API. Introduced earlier this year, the service enables applications to process voice input from users and generate responses using GPT-4o. It promises to reduce response latency by skipping several of the steps usually involved in processing audio. Shortly before releasing Live Roleplays, Speak overhauled its app's speech recognition engine. It upgraded the engine to Conformer-CTC, a speech recognition model introduced by Google LLC researchers in 2020. Conformer-CTC combines the Transformer architecture, which underpins most large language models, with a convolutional neural network. That's a type of AI typically used for computer vision tasks. According to Conformer-CTC's developers, the model can process speech more accurately than algorithms based solely on the Transformer architecture. When it rolled out Conformer-CTC to its speech recognition engine, Speak detailed plans to develop custom LLMs down the line. Building such models can incur significant costs. The $78 million funding round announced today could make it easier for the company to balance those expenses with growth investments. Elaborating on its development roadmap, Speak detailed in today's funding announcement that plans to add support for more languages beyond English. The company will start with Spanish and French next year. Additionally, Speak is working on features that will enable its app to test users' language proficiency in a more accurate manner.

OpenAI-backed Speak raises $78M at $1B valuation to help users learn languages by talking out loud

Languages are typically taught by first exposing you to reading and writing, but native speakers always start learning languages by hearing and talking. Speak has built a platform to teach languages by focusing on how native speakers learn: Using AI, the startup generates audio conversations and listens to users' responses to improve their grasp of a language. Now, Speak is announcing a milestone fundraise that further bolsters its progress: a Series C of $78 million that catapults its valuation to $1 billion. The funding round is being led by Accel, with previous backers OpenAI (via its Startup Fund), Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator also participating. The fundraise is a major jump forward for the startup. Speak confirmed a Series B extension of $20 million at a $500 million valuation only six months ago. Some of this investment activity may well be down to the huge enthusiasm around generative AI and one of Speak's key investors. OpenAI, as you might have guessed, is not just a financial backer here. Speak is using the company's technology to power its platform, and the ChatGPT maker's also an early partner for the latest in its speech technology. By association, Speak is proving one of the commercial opportunities for GenAI. "Our 2022 investment in Speak was driven by a shared vision of revolutionizing language learning with AI," said Ian Hathaway, a partner at OpenAI's Startup Fund, in a statement. "Weʼre thrilled to see their world class AI talent and unique product vision create transformative learning experiences for a rapidly growing userbase worldwide." One of the primary aims for the funding will be to expand the number of target languages users can learn with Speak -- and thus its customer base -- starting with Spanish and French. So far, eight-year-old Speak has been focusing on people studying just one language -- English, the world's most popular language for learning. Speak provides learning and review materials designed around courses; the idea here is that it will complement what users may have studied elsewhere. Currently the company lists eight originating languages for learning English, based on the most popular language groups among English learners to date. "For the one and a half billion people out there trying to learn English, the vast majority of them have spent 15+ years learning intensely. They know vocabulary and grammar better than any of us. But the issue is that they have no ability to speak it," said CEO Connor Zwick, who co-founded the company with Andrew Hsu (CTO). "For us, our value proposition up until now has really been, let's teach people how to communicate in the language." To be clear, that 1.5 billion figure is Speak's total addressable market, not its user number. It doesn't actually disclose how many active users it has. As a guide, Hsu said Speak's app has been downloaded more than 10 million times, and average usage is around 10-20 minutes/day, paying $20 per month, or $99 per year, typically a fraction of the price of hiring a human tutor to work on improving conversation. Speak for Business, an enterprise tier, has over 200 customers, the company said. Zwick describes Speak as part learning method and part tech platform that works in a three-step process. First, you are thrown into listening and talking -- an interesting approach, considering that Hsu and Zwick met and started working together after going through a cohort as Thiel Fellows, where you are, in theory, thrown into building an enterprise rather than going through years of learning first. "We're not going to explain every single grammatical rule to you," Zwick said of the first step of its program. Second, you are then asked to apply that new term or phrase over and over -- "basically drills where you just practice saying it out loud with various other pieces of languages so that it becomes automatic, with no translation." Third, Speak then presents the phrase in "a real-world context using AI... That's how you really anchor it," Zwick said. Ironically, although the aim is to get its learners speaking a new language with humans, there are no humans in the loop. This is all crafted using speech recognition, natural language processing, generative AI and more to tailor the learning to the learner. Does it work, though? For now, Speak doesn't have any integrations with any standardized language learning qualifications, if you believe in that particular metric. That is a route others in the online language learning space have taken, with Duolingo, for example, providing an English test that international students can use to prove their English competency for thousands of English-language universities. "We are explicitly trying not to be a test prep solution, frankly, because, unfortunately, all tests so far are imperfect," Zwick said. "What ends up happening is that people end up gaming tests. They try to become good at taking that test. They're not trying to become good at actually being able to communicate and use the language in the real world. The only way to really have a proper assessment is to have an expert have a conversation with you. There are some tests like that. But how do we scale that to everyone?" Hsu hinted that this could be part of the company's plan in the long term, however. "This system we're building right now to quantify fluency and efficacy, I think [it] will be really useful for launching something like a true, actually accurate English fluency score or test," he said. Gamification is also not an area that Speak has explored to date, sitting out one of the bigger trends in online learning in the last several years (for now, at least). Duolingo and companies like Kahoot have leaned into it though, turning the art of learning into something of a game. New services like Eleven Labs' multilingual AI agents launched in November will potentially open the field to more language-learning services also pursuing ways to encourage speaking that will take on features like gamification. Some of the funding might see more consumer-driven models like this introduced as well. Now with more staff, "there's room to bring more of those behavioral mechanisms into the app to result in positive change for the users," Zwick said. But that won't be at the expense of actually learning. "When there's a tug of war between gamification and engagement and efficacy, we will pick efficacy 100% of the time," he said. Ben Quazzo, a partner at Accel who led the investment round, will be joining Speak's board of directors. "Speak has emerged as a standout player in consumer AI, demonstrating exceptional growth and market potential," he said in a statement.

How This AI Language Learning Platform Translated Their Tech Into Unicorn Status

Speak, an AI-powered language learning platform, just achieved unicorn status. The San Francisco-based company announced on Tuesday a $78 million series C round of funding that values it at $1 billion. The raise comes amid a flurry of activity, investment and interest in language learning apps and platforms, boosted by advancements in artificial intelligence. "We're in a once-in-a-generation -- potentially the most significant -- technological wave ever, and there's going to be profound changes in the world," says Speak CEO and co-founder Connor Zwick. "Language learning and the way people learn in general is going to be one of the biggest ones." Founded in 2016, Speak is a speech-forward AI language learning app that co-founders Zwick and Andrew Hsu, who is also Chief Technology Officer, say "actually works."

OpenAI-Backed Language Tutor Startup Doubles Value to $1 Billion

Speak, a startup using artificial intelligence to help people learn languages, is now worth $1 billion in a new funding round, doubling its valuation from six months ago. The company is set to announce Tuesday that it has raised $78 million led by venture capital firm Accel. Existing investors including the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator also participated. Speak has raised $162 million to date, the company said.