Top Language Learning Startups in 2024

Grammarly stands with Ukraine. We invite you to do the same. Here are some ways you can help: gram.ly/WeStandWithUkraine --- Grammarly’s AI writing assistance is trusted by over 30 million people and 70,000 professional teams. From instantly creating a first draft to perfecting every message, Grammarly helps people at 96% of the Fortune 500 get their point across—and get results—without compromising security or privacy. Grammarly’s product offerings—Grammarly Free, Grammarly Premium, Grammarly Business, and Grammarly for Education—work where you do, delivering contextually relevant writing support across over 500,000 apps and websites. We’re growing our values-driven team to support our expanding customer base! Grammarly is on the Forbes Cloud 100, one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies, one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in AI, and one of Inc.’s Best Workplaces. We operate with a remote-first hybrid work model, meaning we primarily work from home and meet for in-person collaboration at our hubs in San Francisco, Kyiv, New York, Vancouver, and Berlin, or in a workspace in Kraków, as conditions allow. Team members can work in the United States, Canada, Ukraine, Germany, and Poland.

Our mission at Speak is to teach the next billion people how to speak English. We believe that speech recognition and machine learning will transform how people learn English. We're building this future now: software that can understand what a student is saying, give them immediate feedback, and guide them towards fluency, all on their phone.

Preply is a global language learning marketplace, connecting 50,000+ tutors with millions of learners from all over the world. Since the company launched in 2012, students have signed up to more than 15 million lessons. Backed by some of the world’s leading investors, Preply is on a mission to shape the future of effective learning. Fueled by a belief that live engagement with a teacher is still the most effective way to learn a new skill, Preply is building a personalized learning space that will enable individual learners to reach their goals in the fastest way possible. Powered by a tenfold increase in revenues over the last three years, Preply is now leading the online language tutoring segment globally and has 600+ employees of over 50 nationalities based across Barcelona, Kyiv and the US. Preply is driven by a culture of experimentation and data-driven learnings, focused on building best-in-class consumer and enterprise solutions.

Duolingo is the world’s most popular way to learn languages online with over 120 million users. Founded in 2011 by crowdsourcing pioneer Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, it is the most downloaded Education app on iOS and Android and has been awarded Apple's iPhone App of the Year and Android's Best of the Best. With the mission to bring ‘free language education to the world, we’re building a future in which the highest-quality education is accessible to all. Our approach is simple — language learning should be fun, personalized, and based on science. Duolingo has raised US $83.3 million to date from investors including Union Square Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and most recently, Google Capital.

Newsela provides school districts with authentic instructional content that supports their curriculum, empowers teachers across subjects to promote standards-based instruction, and drives student engagement and learning. Content is published daily at 5 reading levels and aligned to standards with student activities and teaching scaffolds designed to bring lessons to life. With over 20 million users, Newsela is already helping kids improve their reading skills in all 50 states and more than 150 countries. We're looking for passionate, creative people with quick minds and warm hearts to join us. If you believe that all students deserve a more rigorous, more personalized learning experience, please apply to join our team.

BoldVoice (YC S21) is the AI-powered accent and speech coaching app that empowers the 500+ million non-native English speakers in the global workforce to speak English clearly and confidently, in order to succeed professionally.

We are a well-funded, VC-backed stealth startup in the San Francisco Bay Area working on ‍AI Customization and Alignment. We are a highly technical team with expertise in LLM alignment and reinforcement learning from Stanford, Hugging Face, and Google. Collinear’s mission is to accelerate enterprise adoption of open source LLMs by providing customization-as-a-service, thereby unleashing the full potential of AI, surpassing current limitations and expectations. ‍ ‍By generating and utilizing synthetic data, Collinear AI can train models in safe, controlled environments, reducing the risk of harmful outputs and ensuring that deployments are ethical and align with client and societal values.‍‍ Simply put, we enable enterprises to adopt open-source LLMs by customizing them for their use cases and requirements.

PingoLearn is a mobile-first micro-learning app. We offer language courses with mini video lessons inspired by real-life conversations.

Gabb Global's advantage is the extensive application of neuroscience perspective and methods that produce the most comfortable environment for someone learning a new language. Our neuroscience research demonstrates our reliability and validity. Our professional linguists and learning experience designers coming together help to create and unforgettable learning experience. Together, we create a flexible and efficient style of immersive learning.

Using a proprietary ML-driven engine, Slang offers an unprecedented variety of online specialized English courses for career development. Slang started as a project at MIT aimed at using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to create the fastest, most efficient method for learning a new language. The core of Slang is an adaptive e-learning platform that offers a variety of technical and professional courses like Accounting, Finance, and Project Management, among others.