Image Credits: george clerk (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
AI-powered language learning app Speak is on a tear.
Since launching in its inaugural market of South Korea in 2019, Speak has grown to over 10 million users, CEO and co-founder Connor Zwick told TechCrunch. Its user base has doubled every year for the last five years, and Speak now has customers in more than 40 countries.
Keen to see Speak’s expansion continue, investors are now pledging additional cash to the startup.
The company this week closed a $20 million Series B extension led by Buckley Ventures, with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham and LinkedIn executive chairman Jeff Weiner. The capital injection brings Speak’s total raised to $84 million and doubles the startup’s valuation to half-a-billion dollars.
Speak, launched in 2014 by Zwick and Andrew Hsu, who met while at the Thiel Fellowship, is designed to teach language by having users learn speaking patterns and practice repetition in crafted lessons rather than memorize vocabulary and grammar. In this way, it’s not dissimilar to Duolingo, particularly Duolingo’s newer generative AI features. But true to its namesake verb, Speak emphasizes verbalizing above all else.
Image Credits: Speak
“Our core philosophy is centered around getting users to speak out loud as much as possible,” Zwick said. “Attaining fluency helps people form connections, connect cultures and create economic opportunity. It remains the most important part of language learning for people, yet historically, the least supported through technology.”
Speak started with English, and has since launched lessons in Spanish, powered by a speech recognition model trained on in-house data. Next up is French, but Zwick didn’t say exactly when it will launch lessons for that.
Speak makes money by charging $20 per month, or $99 per year, for access to all of the app’s features, including review materials and one-off courses.
With a 75-person workforce across offices in San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo and Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia), Speak’s near-to-long-term roadmap is developing new models that deliver better real-time feedback on tone and pronunciation, Zwick said.
Image Credits: george clerk (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
AI-powered language learning app Speak is on a tear.
Since launching in its inaugural market of South Korea in 2019, Speak has grown to over 10 million users, CEO and co-founder Connor Zwick told TechCrunch. Its user base has doubled every year for the last five years, and Speak now has customers in more than 40 countries.
Keen to see Speak’s expansion continue, investors are now pledging additional cash to the startup.
The company this week closed a $20 million Series B extension led by Buckley Ventures, with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham and LinkedIn executive chairman Jeff Weiner. The capital injection brings Speak’s total raised to $84 million and doubles the startup’s valuation to half-a-billion dollars.
Speak, launched in 2014 by Zwick and Andrew Hsu, who met while at the Thiel Fellowship, is designed to teach language by having users learn speaking patterns and practice repetition in crafted lessons rather than memorize vocabulary and grammar. In this way, it’s not dissimilar to Duolingo, particularly Duolingo’s newer generative AI features. But true to its namesake verb, Speak emphasizes verbalizing above all else.
Image Credits: Speak
“Our core philosophy is centered around getting users to speak out loud as much as possible,” Zwick said. “Attaining fluency helps people form connections, connect cultures and create economic opportunity. It remains the most important part of language learning for people, yet historically, the least supported through technology.”
Speak started with English, and has since launched lessons in Spanish, powered by a speech recognition model trained on in-house data. Next up is French, but Zwick didn’t say exactly when it will launch lessons for that.
Speak makes money by charging $20 per month, or $99 per year, for access to all of the app’s features, including review materials and one-off courses.
With a 75-person workforce across offices in San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo and Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia), Speak’s near-to-long-term roadmap is developing new models that deliver better real-time feedback on tone and pronunciation, Zwick said.
Image Credits: george clerk (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
AI-powered language learning app Speak is on a tear.
Since launching in its inaugural market of South Korea in 2019, Speak has grown to over 10 million users, CEO and co-founder Connor Zwick told TechCrunch. Its user base has doubled every year for the last five years, and Speak now has customers in more than 40 countries.
Keen to see Speak’s expansion continue, investors are now pledging additional cash to the startup.
The company this week closed a $20 million Series B extension led by Buckley Ventures, with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, and LinkedIn executive chairman, Jeff Weiner. The capital injection brings Speak’s total raised to $84 million and doubles the startup’s valuation to half-a-billion dollars.
Speak, launched in 2014 by Zwick and Andrew Hsu, who met while at the Thiel Fellowship, is designed to teach language by having users learn speaking patterns and practice repetition in crafted lessons rather than memorize vocabulary and grammar. In this way, it’s not dissimilar to Duolingo, particularly Duolingo’s newer generative AI features. But true to its namesake verb, Speak emphasizes verbalizing above all else.
Image Credits: Speak
“Our core philosophy is centered around getting users to speak out loud as much as possible,” Zwick said. “Attaining fluency helps people form connections, connect cultures and create economic opportunity. It remains the most important part of language learning for people, yet historically, the least supported through technology.”
Speak started with English, and has since launched lessons in Spanish, powered by a speech recognition model trained on in-house data. Next up is French, but Zwick didn’t say exactly when it will launch lessons for that.
Speak makes money by charging $20 per month, or $99 per year, for access to all of the app’s features, including review materials and one-off courses.
With a 75-person workforce across offices in San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo and Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia), Speak’s near-to-long-term roadmap is developing new models that deliver better real-time feedback on tone and pronunciation, Zwick said.
HBO’s new documentary, “MoviePass, MovieCrash,” tells a story that many of us know about: how MoviePass, the subscription-based movie ticketing startup, was a catastrophic failure. After a series of mishaps and deception, it filed for bankruptcy in 2020.
However, the movie also tells the underreported tale of two Black men who aimed to disrupt the moviegoing space but were then thrown out of the company and forced to watch from the sidelines as their creation burned to the ground.
Mitch Lowe, a former Redbox and Netflix executive, and Ted Farnsworth, CEO of analytics and consulting company Helios & Matheson, are often considered the faces of MoviePass. However, neither of them deserves credit. MoviePass was originally co-founded by former Miramax exec Stacy Spikes and serial entrepreneur Hamet Watt.
The premiere of “MoviePass, MovieCrash,” which is available on Max starting today, comes at a time when only 2.7% of U.S. businesses are majority Black-owned, according to recent estimates from the Annual Business Survey. Spikes hopes this documentary will shed light on his perspective and underscore the necessity of increased funding for Black founders.
“The truth is going to be told,” Spikes told TechCrunch. He added that the documentary is not only about “the rise and fall of MoviePass,” but also addresses the fact that we’re still in the early days of venture capitalists’ mindsets changing and that “more women and founders of color” are being accepted.
(We recommend watching the documentary before reading this article.)
When Lowe was first brought on as CEO in 2016, MoviePass had already existed for five years. It was initially a membership where customers got their own debit card that automatically loaded with theexact amount of a movie ticket. Customers selected the film they wanted to see within the MoviePass app. However, user growth wasn’t where it needed to be — the service was hovering at around 20,000 subscribers.
The company also needed more money, yet it faced the harsh reality of the disparity in venture capital funding for Black-owned companies. To this day, a minuscule portion of funding goes to Black founders. In 2023, Black founders in the U.S. raised 0.48% of all venture capital, so about $661 million out of the $136 billion allocated in total. This number was the lowest recorded in recent history, with Black founders typically making up at least 1% of all venture dollars deployed.
Ultimately, the founders thought that bringing on a “white male with grey hair” would inspire other white males to be “more comfortable” investing, Watt shared in the documentary. A year after Lowe joined, Helios & Matheson bought a controlling stake in MoviePass for $27 million.
Image Credits: HBO
“You had these seasoned founders who knew what they were doing and had a lot of success and yet hit a ceiling with being able to raise capital. Then you have two white guys who can raise $150 million off the very same brand,” Spikes told us. He took the role of chief operating officer until 2018. Watt remained a member of the board.
MoviePass quickly shifted gears under its new owner. To draw in as many customers as possible, the company lowered the subscription fee significantly to $10 per month for one movie every day. The price change attracted approximately 175,000 users in 48 hours, giving the service mainstream prominence. By 2018, it had skyrocketed to over 3 million subscribers.
“The $10 price was supposed to be promotional. We were only going to put 100,000 people at that level. The moment [Lowe and Farnsworth] said they didn’t want to turn that off was a big red flag because $10 is not a sustainable price. It’s just not,” Spikes added, explaining that the average ticket price was $11.50 at the time, so customers going to multiple movies per week cost the company tons of money.
In fact, MoviePass was losing millions of dollars every month. It lost $40 million in May 2018 alone.
Spikes’ warnings to Lowe and Farnsworth were ignored, and MoviePass fired him in 2018, he says. Watt was also let go.
“Mitch and Ted would push back and say, ‘We know what we’re doing. We bought you. Thank you for sharing,’” Spikes said in the documentary. “It broke my heart to see two Black founders create a company the way we did, and then all of a sudden, there was an all-white board.”
“He just wasn’t being a constructive member of the team,” Lowe said.
Attempts to reach Lowe and Farnsworth for comment were unsuccessful.
Image Credits: HBO
Later on, MoviePass went back on its unlimited movie promise and began limiting its offering to three movies a month. The company also tried alternate revenue streams like selling data to advertisers, producing movies via an in-house studio and even a bizarre venture into the airline business.
From extravagant yacht parties to frivolous spending of $1.1 million on an unnecessary Coachella event, the spending spree exemplified an outrageous level of corporate greed.
When speaking about the Coachella event, Lowe said, “I sensed a resentment by the MoviePass employees [who weren’t invited.] Each individual has their various roles and not all roles get to party.”
“I’m sitting at home and in my Twitter feed, here’s Dennis Rodman getting out of a MoviePass helicopter at Coachella… [They’re] burning through money. The staff is suffering…It doesn’t make any sense,” Spikes said during our interview.
Meanwhile, customer support workers and other MoviePass team members were dealing with a sinking ship as the site faced repeated outages and angry customers. (Spikes claimed in a previous interview with TechCrunch that those crashes were intentional.) In the summer of 2019, a data breach exposed tens of thousands of MoviePass card numbers as well as customers’ personal credit card numbers.
In its short years under Lowe and Farnsworth, MoviePass crumbled. The two executives are currently awaiting trial after pleading not guilty to one count of securities fraud and three counts of wire fraud.
Spikes, meanwhile, managed to turn his story around. He purchased MoviePass in 2021 and relaunched it last year. It appears to be successful so far as it became profitable for the first time in 2023.
During the interview with TechCrunch, Spikes also mentioned details that didn’t make it in HBO’s new film, such as building a VR app for MoviePass viewers to watch movie trailers on Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro headsets. He’s hoping for a summer launch.
Watt founded his own venture capital firm, Share Ventures, in 2019, which invests in healthcare and tech companies.
What does it take to raise your first round of funding? That’s just one of the many topics that will be featured at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 on April 25 in Boston.
At this daylong event, experienced founders, VCs and startup experts will lead sessions focused on the building blocks that new and prospective founders need to know. It’s where to go to get help, not hype.
Buy your ticket before our launch price ends January 26, and you’ll save $300* off a Founder or Investor pass.
Tom Blomfield’s talking at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024
Raising your first round requires artful finesse, because the last thing you want to do, years from now, is look back and regret the terms, conditions or side letters.
It’s a serious subject, and it’s why we’re excited to announce that Tom Blomfield, a group partner at Y Combinator, will join us at TC Early Stage for a session called “How to raise money and come out alive.”
That might sound a bit dramatic, but there may be days when it feels like fundraising might age you — so arm yourself with solid, up-to-date information. During this session, Blomfield will talk about the way investors think, the common gotchas that might come back to haunt you, and how to put your company in the strongest possible position to raise.
Get to know Tom Blomfield: Group partner at Y Combinator
Prior to joining Y Combinator, Tom Blomfield, a British entrepreneur, founded two companies valued at more than $1 billion. He co-founded Monzo, one of the first app-based challenger banks in the U.K., which raised more than £500 million and counts 10% of the U.K. population as its customers.
He also previously founded GoCardless, an online payments processor for the Direct Debit system.
TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 takes place on April 25, 2024, in Boston. Prices go up January 26! Buy a TC Early Stage pass now, save up to $300 — and join us in Boston!
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