The EU is a cultural and linguistic melting pot made up of 28 countries with even more traditions and languages. Officially, only 24 languages are recognised for the purpose of diplomatic exchanges, excluding minority languages such as Welsh, Luxembourgish and Catalan, as these people also speak a language already recognised – in the aforementioned cases, English, German and French, and Spanish.
While the exact number of polyglot speakers around the world is unknown, a 2012 study conducted on behalf of the European Commission found that 54% of European citizens are bilingual, 25% are trilingual and 10% speak at least four languages.
The Estonian population was found to be the least likely to speak the country’s official language (Estonian) as their mother tongue, with 80% speaking a different first language – Russian made up a significant portion at 19%.
It might not come as a surprise, therefore, that language learning tool Lingvist is based in Estonia. The startup raised $8m in series A funding from a consortium including Smartcap, the investment arm of the Estonian Development Fund, last week.
The round was led by Japan-based internet company Rakuten, which should be instrumental for Lingvist’s planned expansion into Asia, and featured venture capital firm Inventure as well as angel investors Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of voice-over-IP service Skype, and Geoff Prentice, former chief strategy officer of Skype.
Lingvist claims its software is able to teach people a new language in 200 hours – it offers lessons in English and French, but expects to add Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese and Swedish in the near future.
Lingvist is currently participating in Incubator Tallinn and has been sponsored by the EU’s Operational Program for Cohesion Policy Funds 2014-20, a €4.9bn ($5.3bn) initiative to reform Estonia’s education network, support the national and international expansion of small and medium-sized enterprises as well as research and innovation, and drive improvement of international transport connections. Details about that deal remain undisclosed however.
The company competes with other learning tools such as US-based Duolingo, which secured $45m in a series D round in June 2015 led by Google Capital, the growth equity arm of conglomerate Alphabet.
Lingvist’s unique selling point goes beyond the fact that it is a gamified, free experience to the end user. In fact, the company’s website reveals that the product will remain free only while it is in public beta, with the eventual pricing plan not yet revealed.
The learning process is based on technology that continuously analyses progress to adapt the course in real time, picking up on which words a user is remembering more easily and building a profile of the learner’s memory pattern.
Mait Müntel, one of the company’s three co-founders, further explained to technology news website TechCrunch last year that Lingvist crunches “through immense quantities of text to establish frequencies and correlations that enable us to prioritise what is most important in a language and teach the most relevant and contemporary vocabulary. The order is not [the] same for everyone, but depends on each and every student’s skills and knowledge”.
The 200 hours of study time, Lingvist claims, will enable a student to read texts, watch films and have casual conversations in the target language.
Lingvist’s latest funding round, which followed a $1.1m seed round backed by Smartcap, Inventure and angel investors in April 2014, will support an expansion across Europe, Asia and the Middle East over the next 18 months. The company had 100,000 users as of August this year.
The money will also be used to develop the technology and drive recruitment of additional developers, data scientists, computational linguists and designers.