Lingumi offers AI-driven English language lessons targeted at toddlers and pre-schoolers, with its first course designed for two-year-olds. Lessons are built around social learning and include interactive speaking tasks, teacher videos and games. The company reports children learn vocabulary up to six times faster on its platform and that it is 95% cheaper than live courses. Lingumi is used by more than 100,000 families globally, with 40% of active users playing lessons daily and over 1.5 million English lessons delivered in China in the past six months. Founder and CEO Toby Mather and the team emphasize personalized curricula empowered by AI and an asynchronous teaching model. The company plans to expand its technology and marketing teams in London, Cardiff, Singapore and Shenzhen using the new funding. Lingumi offers a digital-first language-learning platform for pre-school children, delivering a single daily lesson of around 20 minutes through an app and upselling simple physical products like Play Cubes and Jumbo Word Cards. The product is built around a curriculum focused on natural spoken English and designed for co-learning with parents or caregivers, with the app deliberately limiting screen time. The company pivoted from a connected-toy concept to a pure digital subscription model in mid-2018 after families requested more curriculum, and now sells the physical items separately. Lingumi leverages child-level data to personalize learning trajectories and emphasizes accessibility for middle- and working-class families. The startup reports about 10,000 users across more than 40 countries, with primary focus in Western Europe, Taiwan and growing activity in China, including pilots for kindergarten deployments. Founded by CEO Toby Mather and CTO Adit Trivedi after pairing at Entrepreneur First in late 2015, the company is based in London and Cardiff and plans to use new funding to expand its digital and physical product ecosystem and enter new markets. Lingumi is an education-technology startup that builds games and a connected toy, Lingumi Play, to teach foreign languages to toddlers. Lingumi Play pairs foam cubes with an iOS/Android app using augmented reality to introduce language concepts without requiring screen interaction. The company has developed the Lingumi Method, a curriculum for children aged two and up, and supports six languages including Mandarin and Spanish with a primary focus on English. The method was developed alongside academics worldwide, including William O'Grady, and the company plans to expand the curriculum and train teachers to use the method alongside digital resources. Lingumi launched foam toys across Europe earlier in the year with a particular focus on Germany after beginning with paper prototypes. The founders are Toby Mather (an Oxford graduate) and CTO Adit Trivedi, and the company is a member of Entrepreneur First's 5th cohort. The startup cites market data that worldwide English-language-learning spending tops $150 billion and grows ~25% annually.

Total raised

$7M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Apr 2020