Fluent Forever, a startup that uses a new learning system to help its users master a new language faster, raised a $ 4.9 million funding round led by Denver-based Stout Street Capital. Other investors in this round include The Syndicate, LAUNCH, Mana Ventures, Noveus VC, Flight.VC, Insta VC, UpVentures, Firebrand Ventures, Cultivation Capital, Spero Ventures, and Lofty Ventures.
In many ways, Fluent Forever is a direct competitor of Duolingo, Babbel and similar services for online language learning. What sets it apart is the focus on a personalized learning system that emphasizes ear training, visual aids, and something like spaced repetition to help you memorize new words and phrases. It's a paid service (after a 14-day free trial) with subscriptions starting at $ 10 per month for a monthly subscription and the usual discounts for long-term commitments.
To teach his first languages on his own, company founder and CEO Gabriel Wyner used the popular Anki flashcard service, wrote a book about his approach, and held seminars on learning languages using his system with Anki. But as he noted, Anki it's a serious tool and simply learning how to get the most out of it takes a lot of time and energy.
"I've seen everyone else fail in language learning," she told me. "And the first thought is, okay, well, if you learn how to do it right, then it's a solvable thing. It is exciting. And then once you have a solution for people and they're all excited about it, but then you see them fail for IT reasons. It's even more frustrating. "
In many ways, then, Fluent Forever takes Wyner's flashcard approach - because building those flashcards by hand is at the heart of its learning system - and turns it into a much easier-to-use application.
What people want, Wyner acknowledged, is a tool where you just press a few buttons and learn something. But it does not work. "I had to have a very strong reaction to that - a really strong response - and say, 'absolutely not. That's the only thing that teaches you how to build it.'"
Wyner is not afraid to compare his approach to Duolingo's and argues that his focus on translation exercises doesn't translate into real long-term language skills. At the same time, it freely acknowledges that Duolingo's user experience and gamification are far better than Fluent Forever. But he also believes that students see much better results with his system.
"We ask [our users]: 'Why are you with us? Why should you pay for us when you could just get Duolingo for free? "What they come back to is, 'yes, your product is rough around the edges. I wish you could fix this, this and that, but you got me thinking in Spanish in two weeks," Wyner said.
Fluent Forever currently supports nine languages: Japanese, French, Russian, Mexican and Spanish Spanish, Italian, Korean, German and Brazilian Portuguese, with Dutch being the next language the team is tackling.
As Wyner told me, the company had trouble growing in 2019, partly because the service was experiencing pretty flat growth at the time. "People are very skeptical of language learning - this is not a sexy field. People don't like it. Nobody liked the idea of jumping and trying to be competitive with Duolingo, "he told me. In 2020, however, growth has increased, even before the COVID pandemic. At the same time, Fluent Forever also participated in Jason Calacanis ' Start throttle.
Looking ahead, Wyner tells me that Fluent Forever is looking for ways to engage live tutors. Online live tutoring has been done in the past, of course, and there are some companies like Preply that already specialize in this, but what Fluent Forever wants to do is to combine the online language learning service with short live sessions and then use the online component to go back to that conversation over the course of a week or so. One advantage here is that these users, who will likely pay a premium for the live service, will also use their time with the live tutors to create their own custom phrases in the Fluent Forever system, which could eventually become content available to all. users too.