An AI teacher named Arya, a scrapped freelancer idea, and a founder who once froze at his own campus placement. This is how a bootstrapped Bengaluru app turned English practice into a daily habit for millions.
Shivam Gupta had the resume. IIT-Kharagpur, Delhi University, a stint that would later read like a highlight reel to any recruiter. And still, when it was his turn to speak English in a campus placement room, he froze. The words were there. The confidence was not. That gap - between knowing a language and being able to open your mouth and use it - is the entire reason MySivi exists.
MySivi is an AI-powered English-speaking app, built in Bengaluru and accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Its core promise is narrow and unglamorous: give people a patient, always-available partner to practice talking, and correct them without making them feel small. In a country where roughly 265 million of 1.4 billion people are comfortable in English, that is less a feature and more a door.
The centerpiece is Arya, the app's AI teacher. That naming choice matters more than it looks. People do not practice with a "conversational language model." They practice with someone. Arya listens, replies, and gives instant feedback on grammar, pronunciation, and fluency - the three things a mirror cannot correct. Early versions were built on OpenAI models, then tuned for the specific, forgiving job of coaching a nervous speaker.
Around Arya sits the rest of the toolkit: topic prompts covering interviews, travel, health, and everyday small talk; a structured learning path; and targeted prep for IELTS, TOEFL, and job interviews. Because knowing English and practicing English are different problems, MySivi wraps the whole thing in game mechanics - streaks, badges, points - to turn a good intention into a daily return.
MySivi's user is not the person who already codes in English or reads novels in it. It is the graduate who understands every word in a meeting but cannot risk saying one. It is the job-seeker prepping for an interview, the student before an exam, the professional who wants to stop rehearsing sentences in their head. The app meets them where they are - literally - offering instruction in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, and more. You learn the second language through your first.
Here is the part founders will appreciate. The team did not walk into Y Combinator with an English app. They walked in with a freelancer platform. Execution friction and regulatory reality made that road harder than it looked, and inside the batch they pivoted to language learning. YC, as the saying goes, buys the team, not the idea. MySivi is a clean example of the check following the people.
There was one more twist. The app first launched as Speakify AI. A trademark clash with Speechify forced a rename mid-growth - the kind of thing that quietly terrifies any team with momentum. The answer was MySivi, an acronym that doubles as a curriculum: Speak, Interact, Verbally Improve.
Plenty of apps will grade your pronunciation. MySivi's distinct move was adding a peer-learning network in 2023 - a way to practice with real humans, not only with Arya. The logic is honest about how confidence actually forms: an AI is a safe, no-judgment place to fail repeatedly, but the feeling of being understood by another person is what finally makes speaking stick. Most competitors pick one lane. MySivi runs both.
Against the broad field - Duolingo, ELSA Speak, Cambly, Speak, Enguru - MySivi's edge is focus and locale. It is spoken-first, India-first, and vernacular-first, aimed squarely at the confidence gap rather than at streak-based vocabulary drills.
The model is freemium. A free tier gives limited daily practice; paid subscriptions unlock the rest. Indicative pricing has ranged from a weekly pass to an annual plan, with iOS in-app purchases roughly between $14.99 and $79.99.
| Plan | Indicative price |
|---|---|
| Free tier | ~30 min / day |
| Weekly | ~Rs 199 |
| Monthly | ~Rs 399 |
| Quarterly | ~Rs 699 |
| Annual | ~Rs 1,399 |
What is notable is the restraint. After the initial YC seed of about $500K in 2022, MySivi grew largely bootstrapped, reportedly crossing the $1M revenue mark. In a market that measures itself in raise announcements, quietly reaching real revenue is the flex nobody puts on a billboard.
The founding trio is heavy on engineering. Shivam Gupta is a Kaggle Competition Master with ML time at Microsoft and Huawei. Anoop Jaiswal is a software engineer out of NIT Jamshedpur, formerly at Kredily. Akshay Sanghai, the CEO, runs growth, product, marketing, and operations - and has cited 25%+ monthly growth stretches. The core team has stayed lean, a bet that talent density beats headcount.
India's generative-AI market is projected to grow into the tens of billions by the end of the decade, and spoken-English demand is one of its most concrete consumer wedges. MySivi sits at the intersection of edtech, consumer AI, and vernacular access - a place where the total market is enormous but the actual product need is specific and personal. The company is not trying to teach the world grammar. It is trying to get one nervous person to say the sentence out loud.
Enters with a freelancer-platform idea, then pivots to English learning as Speakify AI.
Raises ~$500K; the AI teacher begins giving instant feedback on spoken English.
A trademark clash forces a new name; a peer-learning network is added.
Reaches millions of installs with a 4.38-star average across 50,000+ reviews.