Partnering with Preply: Connecting the World Through Human-Led, AI-Enabled Language Learning

Languages are the basis of how we express ourselves; they are a defining cornerstone of nations and cultural identity. They carry history and values across generations, and they open doors to empathy, belonging, and opportunity in an increasingly interconnected world. As our economies and communities globalize, the ability to learn and use new languages becomes essential infrastructure for mobility and growth and is the underpinning of human connection.

Worldwide there are ~2 billion language learners, with a range of motivations including fostering closer family ties, connecting with one's cultural roots, or boosting career advancement. Yet learning another language and achieving true fluency can be an arduous task, taking years. Learners are often limited to casual, gamified apps that don’t deliver the richness of genuine human interactions, or to old school offline language classes, which can be prohibitively expensive, at inconvenient locations and with intensively rigid schedules that don’t slot into most people’s routines.

To offer a better solution, Preply offers the world’s largest network of high quality language tutors to cater to your personal needs, supported by novel AI capabilities. That unique combination of human expertise with the innovation of AI has the potential to change learning forever.

At WestCap we are longtime fans of the Preply platform, with several team members learning a range of subjects, including Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, French, Urdu and more, with tutor relationships spanning 4 continents. Since first meeting Co-Founder and CEO Kirill Bigai in 2023, we have stayed close and built a deep relationship with the team, connecting over WestCap and CōLab’s experience in scaling category-leading marketplaces.

And today, we are proud to announce we are leading a Series D round in the company.

Introducing Preply: Real tutors, supported by AI

Preply is the leading marketplace for language tutors, spanning 180+ countries and over 160+ subjects. Through Preply, you can enjoy real-life conversations anytime, anywhere – fitting lessons seamless into your schedule. Preply’s global pool of 100K+ experienced tutors makes it easy to find someone who fits your budget, often at a fraction of the rates of local, offline services. Whether you’re learning a language for work, travel, or casual conversations, Preply helps you find a tutor who speaks your native language or even specializes in specific dialects and accents. Most importantly, you’ll be matched with a tutor whose personality and teaching style suits your needs, helping you build a long-term, meaningful connection.

Finding the right personal match matters, because learning with a tutor is a deeply personal experience that can last years, often shaped through conversing about your own interests, family and aspirations, in addition to learning about the culture and language at hand. Preply puts the human relationship at the heart of the learning experience, tapping into the realism, empathy and personal motivation a tutor can provide whilst also catering to the ever-changing social and cultural nuances that true fluency requires. To enhance those 1:1 lessons even further, Preply is deploying AI to create a truly unique proposition for learners and tutors alike.

Here’s how they do it: Drawing on their unique data moat of millions of daily events, Preply powers AI to provide a curated, personalized experience for both learners and tutors. Preply has created a symbiotic relationship between real-life human interaction and AI, as personal interests and context discussed in lessons fuel hyper-personalized, AI-generated insights and exercises that cater to the learners specific strengths and weaknesses. This also acts as a co-pilot for tutors, allowing them to more effectively address their learners' needs, creating a reinforcing feedback loop, and also keep their focus on teaching. On the tutor side, Preply leverages its data set to provide guided insights on how to improve lesson conversion and retention to ensure enhanced tutor experience and earning potential. Initial traction has been powerful, indicating early promise of a step-change in how users engage and achieve their goals through Preply, whilst empowering tutors.

The Power of Marketplaces

The challenges and opportunity in building a global, two-sided marketplace, drawing on forging connections and building communities, are familiar to us at WestCap, given our heritage as former operators and leaders at Airbnb. Since our first meeting with Preply in early 2023, we have been impressed by their sustained execution, sophisticated data-driven experimentation engine and ability to attract, develop and retain top-tier talent. Under the leadership of Co-Founder and CEO, Kirill Bigai, Preply has built a world-class team with extensive experience scaling marketplaces, including executives from Alibaba, Hotels.com, Expedia, Delivery Hero and Rover. We also recognized the strength of Preply’s organic flywheel, and its capital efficient network effects which are strengthening as they scale.

We see immense opportunity for Preply to capitalize on their category-leading position, to create a generational marketplace that will shape how learners and tutors interact, enabling millions to achieve their learning goals.

Preply is redefining how people view language learning, making one of the most effective ways to master a new skill — 1:1 tutoring — accessible and convenient for millions of learners worldwide. Moreover, whilst Preply is primarily focused on languages today, thousands of learners and tutors can learn a swathe of non-language subjects, ranging from AI to Art to Business Strategy. In the future, we see the potential for Preply to become the central hub to facilitate knowledge transfer and cultural exchange, powered by the synthesis between human relationships and AI augmentation.

We look forward to partnering with the Preply team and leveraging our Strategic Operators Group to work hand-in-hand to accelerate Preply’s mission. Onwards!