 | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | E-Learning, language education |
| Founded | 2012 (as Easy Languages), 2013 (as Lingoda) |
| Headquarters | Berlin , Germany |
| Services | Language learning |
Number of employees | 150+ |
| Website | www.lingoda.com |
Lingoda GmbH, operating as Lingoda, is a subscription-based e-learning platform that teaches languages in live classes via video conferencing. It teaches English, German, French, and Spanish, in addition to business English.
Lingoda was founded in Berlin, Germany in 2012 by brothers Fabian and Felix Wunderlich under the name Easy Languages. Its headquarters are in the Mitte district of Berlin. [1]
In 2013, Easy Languages was rebranded as Lingoda, and the company expanded its operations to offer English lessons, as well as classes for small groups. [2] [3] In 2016, Lingoda started teaching French and Spanish courses. [4]
In 2018, LinkedIn listed Lingoda as one of Germany’s 25 most sought-after startups. [5]
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a substantial boost in business for Lingoda. The company reportedly increased its customer numbers by 200 percent in a one-year period from 2020 to 2021. [6] [7]
Since 2020 Lingoda has been offering international health professionals (nurses, midwives, doctors and, since 2023, OTA) preparation for professional recognition in the form of digital courses. [8]
In 2021, Lingoda received an investment of 57 million euros from U.S. based private equity firm Summit Partners; it has reportedly drawn a total of about 70 million euros in investment between its founding and 2021. This funding has led Lingoda to be described as a potential “unicorn startup”, referring to technology companies valued at over US$1 billion. [9] [10] In the same year, Lingoda was named the Hottest EdTech Startup at the Europas Awards. [11] It also won the 2021 EdTech Cool Tool Award for Best Language Learning Solution, [12] and was named Overall Language Learning Company of the Year at the EdTech Breakthrough Awards. [13]
In 2021, Lingoda also launched the initiative Match Pflege to support international health professionals in professional recognition, qualification and integration, offering online language classes. [14]
In summer 2022, Lingoda launched the Match Talent initiative in cooperation with Kiron Open Higher Education to counteract the shortage of skilled workers in Germany. The initiative supports international talents in their qualification and integration into the labour market and German society. Match Talent combines educational programmes offered by partners in Germany with language, integration and career coaching. [14]
Lingoda's business model is similar to traditional language schools but adapted for an online setting. All classes are conducted live through videoconferencing software like Zoom. [15]
PC Magazine gave Lingoda a positive review, praising the in-person instruction and the affordability, although it criticized the company for the limited number of languages it offers. [16]
Heise is a German media conglomerate headquartered in Hanover. It was founded in 1949 by Heinz Heise and is still family-owned. Its core business is directory media as well as general-interest and specialist media from the fields of computer technology, information technology and network culture. Another focus of its business activities is portals for price and product comparisons.
Babbel GmbH, operating as Babbel, is a German subscription-based language learning software and e-learning platform, available in various languages since January 2008.
Memrise is a British language platform that uses spaced repetition of flashcards to increase the rate of learning, combined with a GPT3-powered "AI Language partner" that allows learners to practice human-like conversations, which Memrise believe can help learners to overcome the "confidence gap" in language acquisition. It is based in London, UK.
500 Global is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California in February 2011. They expanded to a second class of 21 in June 2011 and a third class of 34 in October 2011.
Udemy, Inc. is an education technology company that provides an online learning and teaching platform. It was founded in May 2010 by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar.
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment-processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
Coursera Inc. is a U.S.-based massive open online course provider founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera works with universities and other organizations to offer online courses, certifications, and degrees in a variety of subjects. In 2021 it was estimated that about 150 universities offered more than 4,000 courses through Coursera.
Iversity is a Berlin-based online education platform. Since October 2013, iversity has specialised in providing online courses and lectures in higher education, specifically MOOCs. Courses are free and open for anyone to enroll and participate. Many of them are conducted in English or German, but also other languages. iversity cooperates with individual professors as well as different European universities. Some of the courses were winners of the MOOC Production Fellowship held in early 2013. iversity.org officially launched the MOOC platform online in October 2013 and as of February 2015 has a user base of 600,000 online learners, enrolled in 63 courses offered by 41 partner universities. iversity is the only MOOC platform offering courses with ECTS-integration. iversity has branch offices in Bernau bei Berlin, Germany and Berlin.
Databricks is an American enterprise software company founded by the creators of Apache Spark. Databricks develops a web-based platform for working with Spark, that provides automated cluster management and IPython-style notebooks. The company develops Delta Lake, an open-source project to bring reliability to data lakes for machine learning and other data science use cases.
Pluralsight, LLC is an American privately held online education company that offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website. Founded in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams, the company has its headquarters in Farmington, Utah. As of July 2018, it uses more than 1,400 subject-matter experts as authors, and offers more than 7,000 courses in its catalog. Since first moving its courses online in 2007, the company has expanded, developing a full enterprise platform, and adding skills assessment modules.
Vedantu is an Indian multinational online tutoring platform launched in 2014 based in Bengaluru, India. It primarily provides services to students from grades 4 to 12.
Paper is an educational technology company that partners with school systems to provide an unlimited on-demand Educational Support System (ESS) that offers one-on-one tutoring, coaching on writing skills, college and career support, AI-powered literacy help, gamified learning, and after-school enrichment.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple's wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifetime. The CZI is set up as a limited liability company (LLC) and is an example of philanthrocapitalism. CZI has been deemed likely to be "one of the most well-funded philanthropies in human history". Its creation was announced on 1 December 2015, for the birth of their daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg. Priscilla Chan has said that her background as a child of immigrant refugees and experience as a teacher and pediatrician for vulnerable children influences how she approaches the philanthropy's work in science, education, immigration reform, housing, criminal justice, and other local issues.
Andela is a global job placement network for software developers. Andela focuses on sustainable careers, connecting technologists with long-term engagements, access to international roles, competitive compensation, and career coaching through the Andela Learning Community.
Preply is a language learning app and e-learning platform. The company is based in the US with employees in 30 countries across Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Asia. Preply has 400 employees of 58 different nationalities.
Byju's is an Indian multinational educational technology company, headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. It was founded in 2011 by Byju Raveendran and Divya Gokulnath. As of June 2023, Byju's was valued at $5.1 billion. As of April 2023, the company claims to have over 150 million registered students.
Blinkist is a book-summarizing subscription service based in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in 2012 by Holger Seim, Niklas Jansen, Sebastian Klein, and Tobias Balling and has 23 million downloads as of 2023.
GUVI is an IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad incubated company based in Chennai, India. It was founded by ex-PayPal engineers Arun Prakash, Sridevi Arun Prakash, and SP Balamurugan in 2014. GUVI offers free and paid learning courses on various IT and tech domains in Indian vernacular languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, and English.
Unacademy is an Indian Multinational educational technology company that provides online educational platform with its headquarters in Bangalore, Karnataka. It prepares students for various competitive exams, as well as provides content on foundational (K-12) and skill building courses.
The uLesson Group commonly known as uLesson, is a Nigerian edtech company, also operating as an online education platform through uLesson Education mobile application for primary and secondary E-learning. It was founded in 2019 by Sim Shagaya.