Estonia-based language learning platform Lingvist has secured $8m in a series A round led by internet company Rakuten, ArcticStartup reported on Tuesday.
Smartcap, the investment arm of the state-run Estonian Development Fund, venture capital firm Inventure, and angel investors Jaan Tallinn and Geoff Prentice also contributed funding.
Lingvist’s service helps users to learn a new language more quickly by automatically adapting the course to their progress in real time. The platform offers courses in English and French, and expects to add Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese and Swedish in the near future.
The capital will go towards an expansion across Europe, Asia and the Middle East over the next 18 months. Part of the round will also be used to further develop the company’s technology, and to hire more developers, data scientists, computational linguists and designers.
Smartcap, Inventure and assorted angel investors had previously funded a $1.1m seed round for Lingvist in April 2014.
Mait Muntel, chief executive of Lingvist, said: “We are very pleased to welcome a global leader like Rakuten to our corner as an investor as we start to scale out our platform and new language offerings.
“Rakuten’s Englishisation initiative to convert its corporate language from Japanese to English has made them a veritable expert in their own right in language education.”