![]() | |
Type of business | Private |
---|---|
Type of site | Educational |
Available in | English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish |
Traded as | Preply Inc. |
Headquarters | Brookline, United States |
Country of origin | ![]() |
Area served | Worldwide |
Founder(s) | Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn, Serge Lukianov |
CEO | Kirill Bigai |
Industry | Online language learning |
Services | Education service |
Employees | 500+ |
URL | https://preply.com/ |
Launched | November 1, 2012 |
Current status | Active |
Native client(s) on | iOS [2] & Android [3] |
Preply is an online language learning marketplace, connecting tutors to hundreds of thousands of learners in 180 countries worldwide. More than 35,000 tutors teach over 50 languages, powered by a machine-learning algorithm that recommends the best tutors for each learner. [4] Founded in the United States in 2012 by three Ukrainian founders, Kirill Bigai, Serge Lukyanov, and Dmytro Voloshyn, Preply has grown from a team of 3 to a company of over 500 employees of 60 different nationalities. With offices in Barcelona, New York, and Kyiv, employees work across 30 countries in Europe, USA, Africa, Asia and Latin America. [5] [6] [7]
The company was founded in 2012 by Ukrainian entrepreneurs Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn, and Serge Lukyanov. The website, preply.com, was launched in November 2013 with the focus on online language learning. [1]
On August 31, 2013, Preply became a leading Ukrainian educational startup after an initial angel investment of $180,000 from Semyon Dukach, Borya Shakhnovich, Vadim Yasinovsky, Dan Pasko, Torben Majgaard, and Vostok Ventures. [8] [9]
In 2013, the company started expanding into markets of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan and Poland. [9]
In 2016, the Preply platform was restructured by adding a ranking algorithm of machine learning for recommendations and classification of tutors. [10] Preply raised $1.3 million in funding from investors like Techstars, SMRK VCDigital, and Arthur Kosten. The team experienced significant growth, with the employee count reaching 100, marking a seven-fold increase in less than three years. [11]
In 2018, Preply Classroom (formerly Preply space) was launched as the all-in-one language learning ecosystem with the integrated video platform, online chat, screen sharing, and more. [12]
In 2019, Preply opened a new office in Barcelona, Spain, and expanded its services into UK, Germany, and Spanish markets. [10]
In 2021, Preply had accumulated a total of $50.6 million in investments through 8 funding rounds. [13]
In February 2022, the company's Ukrainian co-founders faced the Russian invasion of Ukraine and ensured the safety and support of Preply's Ukrainian employees and their families. In July 2022, Preply raised an additional $50 million of investment. [14]
In August 2023, Preply extended their series C with an additional $70 million raise, led by Horizon Capital. The raise was announced in tandem with the launch of Preply’s AI assistant. The new funds will be used to extend leadership in the category through AI-powered human tutors.The company also opened a New York office. [15] [16]
Preply’s product is based on AI-powered human tutoring. The company uses a machine learning algorithm to increase matching efficiency between learners and tutors on a variety of parameters such as price, availability, country of birth, other languages spoken, learning objectives and more. [17]
Preply offers classes in 50 languages, with tutors functioning as independent contractors who set their own rates and schedules. [18]
In May 2020, Preply won “The Revenue Hack of 2020” at the Ukrainian Startup Awards. [19]
In July 2021, Preply was a finalist for the 2021 Europas award for “Hottest edTech Startup in Europe”. [20]
According to the refund policy, a refund is available within 28 days of payment. [21]
The commission for every trial lesson with a new student is 100%. For all the subsequent lessons, the tutor is charged a percentage of the hourly rate (between 18% and 33%). [22]
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
PrepMe is a for-profit American company that offers online courses and tutoring for standardized achievement tests, in particular those offered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), such as the PSAT and SAT; and the ACT offered by ACT, Inc. PrepMe also developed its Coursification platform to open its adaptive online learning platform to publishers. Over 100,000 students have used the company's programs.
Babbel GmbH, operating as Babbel, is a German subscription-based language learning software and e-learning platform, available in various languages since January 2008.
italki is an online language learning platform which connects language learners and teachers through video chat. The site allows students to find online teachers for 1-on-1 tutoring, and teachers to earn money as freelance tutors. italki is headquartered in Hong Kong, China.
Quizlet is a multi-national American company that provides tools for studying and learning. It was founded in October 2005 by Andrew Sutherland, who at the time was a 15-year old student, and released to the public in January 2007. Quizlet's primary products include digital flash cards, matching games, practice electronic assessments, and live quizzes. In 2017, 1 in 2 high school students used Quizlet. As of December 2021, Quizlet has over 500 million user-generated flashcard sets and more than 60 million active users.
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 believes can help learners to overcome the "confidence gap" in language acquisition. It is based in London, UK.
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.
Brainly is an education company based in Kraków, Poland, with headquarters in New York City. It is an AI-powered homework help platform targeting students and parents. As of November 2020, Brainly reported having 15 million daily active users, making it the world's most popular education app.
Databricks, Inc. is an American software company founded by the original 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.
GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package that can develop, secure, and operate software. The open-source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmytro Zaporozhets and Dutch developer Sytse Sijbrandij. In 2018, GitLab Inc. was considered to be the first partly-Ukrainian unicorn.
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.
Verbling is an online language learning platform that pairs individuals with language teachers via video chat. The company was created at Y Combinator in 2011. In 2015, Verbling raised $2.7 million in series A round funding. Funders have included Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SV Angel, Sam Altman, and Joshua Schachter.
EQT Ventures is the venture capital business of Swedish investment manager EQT AB Group. In May 2016, EQT Ventures announced its first €566m fund that makes minority equity investments in European and US tech companies ranging between €1 million and €50 million.
Byju's is an Indian multinational educational technology company, headquartered in Bangalore. It was founded in 2011 by Byju Raveendran and Divya Gokulnath. As of January 2024, Byju's was valued at $200 millions, a sharp fall from its peak of $22 billion in 2022. As of April 2023, the company claims to have over 150 million registered students.
QANDA is an AI-based learning platform developed by Mathpresso Inc., a South Korea-based education technology company. Its best known feature is a solution search, which uses optical character recognition technology to scan problems and provide step-by-step solutions and learning content.
Moveworks is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company develops an AI platform, designed for large enterprises, that uses natural language understanding (NLU), probabilistic machine learning, and automation to resolve workplace requests.
Daniel Hoffer is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, known for his role as Co-Founder and previous Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the hospitality exchange service, CouchSurfing. Presently, Hoffer serves as Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at technology startup Hayden AI.
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.
{{cite web}}
: |last=
has generic name (help)