Most apps that help you learn a language have a user experience where you select options or swipe away incorrect answer cards, meaning you're more or less talking to 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 AI avatars that “tailor” lessons to the user and speak in several accents, including American, British, Asian, and Indian. The more the learner interacts with the avatar, the more customized the lesson becomes – at least that's the idea.
The company's founding team, Adam Tulayev (CEO), Anton Marin (CTO), and Ilya Chernyakov (CPO), previously worked in the AI services business with clients such as Coca-Cola, Kimberly-Clark, and AstraZeneca. I built some Cleverbots.
“Most language learning apps are all about human interaction with a human tutor, or 'machine-to-human' interaction with clicks and drag-and-drops,” Tulayev told TechCrunch. “But we're the only tone-of-voice app that mimics human-to-human interaction. We were the first to master this AI avatar approach, which is very natural for language learning. It's now on the market. It’s really different from other apps out there.”
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 enrich our models. We use anonymized data.”
“The founding team at Praktika leverages our deep knowledge of AI to create a fun and affordable way to learn languages with personalized AI tutors. For too long, other learning apps have The team's determination to build a global challenger has translated into one of the world's fastest-growing early-stage consumer AI companies. ,” Ophelia Brown, managing partner at Blossom Capital, said in a statement.
Both the seed round and the recent Series A included notable participants such as Carles Reyna (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 inject this human-like element into their product…More than one million learners around the world have improved their language skills with Praktika, and they're already mastering English, but this is just the beginning.”