language-learning
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Akshay Sanghai Is Building an English Classroom That Talks Back
The MySivi co-founder left large-company engineering for a harder systems problem: giving millions of learners a patient place to practise, make mistakes and speak again.
Amir Hanna Posted 627 Videos to Build a Better Scroll
The Parrot CEO went from a C-plus French student and Shell engineer to a founder betting that the internet's most compulsive behavior can teach people to understand one another.
Jennifer Liu
Jennifer Liu is the cofounder and CEO of Toko, an AI English tutor that got its start when a pandemic-era hack called GPT 奶奶 (an AI grandma built to help her practice Mandarin) revealed a far bigger hunger for spoken English across East Asia. An MIT computer science grad and early Quizlet engineer-turned-PM, Liu turned that side project into a Y Combinator (W22) company that now ranks among the top education apps in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand, with 4.9 stars from 20,000-plus reviewers.
Dmitrii Pistolyako
Dmitrii Pistolyako is the co-founder and CEO of LinguaTrip, a San Francisco-based booking platform for language courses and study-abroad programs that has served more than 100,000 students from over 100 countries. A math-and-economics graduate from Saint Petersburg, he turned a free study-abroad consulting side hustle into a venture-backed company, surviving more than 50 investor rejections before becoming the only Russian startup in his 500 Startups batch. He also leads Fluent.Express and shares his playbook for building a company in the US through his Russian-language YouTube channel and online courses.
Michael Xing
Michael Xing is the co-founder and CEO of Pingo AI (YC S25), a language-learning app that builds fluency by letting people talk with an AI tutor in real-life conversations. The idea grew out of weekly Chinese practice sessions with his freshman-year college roommate Morrie Schonfeld. After launching in January 2025, Pingo scaled from zero to hundreds of thousands of users and millions in ARR in under a year, becoming one of Y Combinator's fastest-growing consumer companies and a Google Play Best of 2025 winner. Before Pingo, Xing spent roughly three years at AI startups and built a Chrome extension with 150,000+ downloads.
Diego Villegas
Diego Villegas is the co-founder and CEO of Slang, an MIT-born edtech startup that uses machine learning and NLP to teach industry-specific professional English to the global workforce. A serial entrepreneur, he first built MASA, a Colombian oil-and-gas technical-services firm that grew to roughly $200M in revenue and 5,000+ employees before its acquisition by Stork. The pain of watching capable employees stall - and get laid off - for lack of business English became the seed of Slang, which now offers 150+ career-focused courses to companies including Nestle, Banco Santander, and Hyatt across more than a dozen countries.
Anada Lakra
Anada Lakra is the co-founder and CEO of BoldVoice, an AI-powered accent and speech coaching app for non-native English speakers. Born and raised in Albania, she studied English for a decade before arriving at Yale, where being asked to repeat herself sparked the idea that became BoldVoice. After Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School, with product stints at Peloton and consulting work along the way, she and co-founder Ilya Usorov built a Y Combinator-backed app that pairs Hollywood dialect coaches with real-time AI feedback. BoldVoice has crossed 5 million downloads, serves professionals in 150+ countries, reached $10M+ in ARR with a team of seven, and raised a $21M Series A in January 2026 led by Matrix.
Julie Hansen
Julie Hansen is Chief Revenue Officer and US CEO of Babbel, the language-learning company. She joined in 2017 and turned the US into Babbel's largest market, crossing one million US subscriptions in the first half of 2022. Before Babbel she was the fifth employee at Business Insider, where as President and COO she helped grow it into the most-visited business news site online. Her earlier career spans CBS Interactive, Conde Nast, Time Inc., and Penguin Books. She keeps German vocabulary notebooks, rows on the water at dawn, and was named to the 2025 ASU+GSV Power of Women honor list.
Yi Wang
Yi Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Liulishuo (LingoChamp / LAIX), the Shanghai-based company that built one of the world's first AI-powered English teachers. A Princeton PhD and ex-Google product manager, he returned to China in 2011 and shipped an app that climbed to the top of China's App Store within months, eventually serving tens of millions of learners and taking the company public on the NYSE in 2018.
Cindy Mi
Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKid, a Beijing-based edtech unicorn that connects Chinese children aged 4-12 with North American English teachers through live one-on-one video lessons. A high-school dropout turned billionaire builder, she started tutoring English peers at age 15, co-founded an English academy chain at 17, and by 2020 had grown VIPKid to over 800,000 students, 100,000 teachers, and a $4 billion-plus valuation - backed by Tencent, Sequoia, and the late Kobe Bryant.
Vicky Wang
Vicky Wang is the founder and CEO of WuKong Education, a Silicon Valley-based online learning platform serving 300,000+ families across 118 countries. She built the company from Auckland, New Zealand in 2016 into a Series B-backed edtech brand with 4,000 employees, offering Chinese language, math, and English programs for students aged 3-18. Recognized by Fortune China as one of the Most Influential Business Women in 2021 and 2022, named among HolonIQ's 144 global EdTech Women Leaders, and awarded the 2024 Cognia School of Distinction, Wang is redefining how the world's children learn Mandarin and mathematics.
Nathaniel Drew
Nathaniel Drew is an American content creator, polyglot, and filmmaker based in Paris, France, with over 1.79 million YouTube subscribers. Born in Los Angeles to Argentine-immigrant parents and raised in Portland, Oregon, he skipped college to teach himself filmmaking and launched his YouTube channel in 2015. Known for his cinematic vlogs exploring travel, language learning, identity, and existential questions, he speaks five or more languages and went viral with 'Speaking 5+ Languages with my Polyglot Grandma.' He also hosts the 'No Backup Plan' podcast, runs a Substack newsletter, creates music, and teaches filmmaking through his 'Frame by Frame' masterclass course.
Connor Zwick
Connor Zwick is the CEO and co-founder of Speak, an AI-powered language learning platform that crossed $1 billion in valuation and $100 million in annualized revenue in 2024. A Thiel Fellow who dropped out of Harvard, Zwick built his first app at age 13 and sold Flashcards+ to Chegg as a teenager. He founded Speak in 2016 with Andrew Hsu, and spent years living between San Francisco and Seoul to perfect AI conversation technology for English learners. Today Speak counts over 15 million downloads, backing from OpenAI and Accel, and enterprise customers including KPMG and HD Hyundai.
Sameer Shariff
Sameer Shariff is the co-founder and CEO of Cambly, a San Francisco-based edtech platform that connects English learners worldwide with native-speaking tutors via on-demand video chat. A Princeton and Stanford-educated engineer who spent five years at Google, Shariff co-founded Cambly in 2012 after a trip to Argentina revealed how dramatically conversation practice accelerates language fluency. After a failed Series A attempt, he drove Cambly to cash-flow positivity without touching raised capital - then raised $60M from Benchmark, Bessemer, and others once the company no longer needed it. Cambly has ranked #1 in app stores across 150 countries and reaches an addressable market of 1.5 billion people seeking English fluency.