Most apps that help you learn a language include the ability to select options or swipe away incorrect answer cards, meaning you're more or less interacting with a machine. His language learning app Praktika takes a different approach. Create a personalized AI-powered avatar to recreate a tutor-like experience and use inflections such as tone of voice and emotion to make language learning feel more natural. Masu.
Praktika claims to have 1.2 million monthly active users across 100 countries and says it has generated nearly $20 million in revenue in the past 12 months. To continue its growth, the startup has now secured $35.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Blossom Capital. This round follows an undisclosed $2.5 million seed funding led by Creator Ventures and Blue Wire Capital.
Praktika's users can interact with an AI avatar that “tailors” lessons to the user and speaks in several accents, including American, British, Asian, Indian, etc. The more learners interact with the avatar, the more customized the lessons become — at least, that's the idea.
The company's founding team, Adam Tulayev (CEO), Anton Marin (CTO), and Ilya Tchernyakov (CPO), founded Cleverbots, an AI services business whose clients include Coca-Cola, Kimberly-Clark, and AstraZeneca. previously established.
“Most language learning apps are all about human interaction with a human tutor, or 'machine-to-human' interaction with clicks and drag-and-drops,” Turaev told TechCrunch. “But we're the only app that's about tone of voice, that mimics human-to-human interaction. We're the first to master this AI avatar approach that's very natural for language learning. That's what really sets us apart from other apps on the market today.”
When asked how the startup leverages AI, he replied: “We tune a variety of LLMs, but we are an AI-native company. We used GPT-4, GP Turbo, Gemini, Claude, Mistral. We tune different versions of their models. We've collected a lot of training data, and the app continues to learn. We have terabytes of this human-AI interaction data to power our models. We use anonymized data.”
“Practika's founding team is applying their deep AI knowledge to create a fun, affordable way to learn languages with personalized AI tutors. Other learning apps have long neglected and undervalued students. The team's determination to build a global challenger has led to one of the fastest-growing early-stage consumer AI companies in the world,” Ophelia Brown, managing partner at Blossom Capital, said in a statement.
Both the seed round and the recent Series A saw participation from notable figures such as Carles Reina (Eleven Labs) and Patrice Evra (five-time Premier League champion).
Sasha Kaletsky, managing partner at Creator Ventures, added in a statement: “Learning a language is a fundamental human experience, and the Praktika team has successfully used AI to infuse this human-like element into their product…More than 1 million learners worldwide Improving your language skills At Praktika, you are already learning English, and this is just the beginning.”
