Ukrainian Business Preply Builds Online Learning Marketplace

Ukrainian-founded Preply reached a record-breaking milestone in the company’s funding history today, raising $50 million USD in its series C, amassing more than USD $100 million in investments since inception.

Despite the war in Ukraine, founders Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn and Serge Lukyanov have succeeded in building a truly global business, expanding the team to over 400 employees of 58 different nationalities across 30 countries worldwide. From an education startup, Preply has become a global e-learning powerhouse that connects the world’s largest live language learning community.

Ukrainian Business Preply Builds Online Learning Marketplace

The Series C round was led by Silicon Valley based Owl Ventures, the largest Education Technology investor in the world. Previous investors Diligent Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Educapital, Evli Growth Partners, Przemyslaw Gacek, co-founder of Grupa Pracuj also participated, as well as new investors such as Swisscom Ventures, and Orbit Capital.

What is Preply?

Preply is a massive online language learning marketplace connecting over 32,000 tutors teaching 50 languages to hundreds of thousands of learners in 180 countries worldwide. With student-tutor matches being suggested through a machine-learning algorithm, recommended tutors create customized lesson plans to suit the learner’s budget, schedule, and current knowledge.

Preply was founded in 2012 by the Ukrainian team of Kirill Bigai, Serge Lukyanov, and Dmytro Voloshyn. Today, the company has over 400 employees of 58 different nationalities. Preply is a US company with employees based in 30 countries across Europe, USA, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Preply’s Growth and the Market Trajectory

The Preply marketplace pairs hundreds of thousands of learners with more than 32,000 tutors teaching over 50 languages. Over the past year, Preply has tripled the size of its B2B language learning business which now counts Bytedance (Tiktok), Mercedes and McKinsey amongst its customers.

On the consumer side, the number of people using the Preply app has grown 4x over the last two years and in many geographies overall users have almost doubled year on year.

The number of students being taught on the platform now exceeds the number of students taught in Ivy League universities as the platform plans to conquer the growing online language learning market, set to reach $47 billion by 2025.

Kirill Bigai, Co-founder and CEO of Preply, said, “I am indescribably proud of what the Preply team has achieved. We have become the world’s leading brand in live language classes and the platform of choice for so many tutors who have decided to teach online”.

He added: “With the additional funding, we plan to continue growing our footprint in the US and Europe by doubling down on AI-based matching and delivering on our promise to connect the largest live language learning community in the world.”

Ross Darwin, Principal at Owl Ventures said: “We’re thrilled to partner with Preply on their next phase of growth.  We’re particularly excited by the continued momentum of the consumer business as well as its new language learning offering for companies, increasingly reliant on international workforces.”

Preply in Ireland

Around 230 Preply tutors were born in Ireland. However, the majority of Irish tutors are members of Ireland’s large diaspora, with 59% of them teaching from another country, such as Spain, the UK, Thailand, Italy, France, or Vietnam.

Their students come from a variety of places, from Italy to Brazil, Russia to Spain, and Poland to France. Over 100 nationalities are currently being taught by Irish tutors. One Irish tutor even had 137 students on Preply in 2021 alone.

Supporting Ukraine through business

Though Preply’s main offices are in the U.S. & Europe, the founders hail from Kyiv. Over the last few months, the company’s global workforce have launched a number of meaningful initiatives to support Ukraine.

This includes a ‘Messages to Ukraine’ campaign, translating over 8000 global messages of support into Ukrainian, as well as a free language assistance program for 1000 Ukrainian refugees  grappling with a new language.