French Language Teaching Platform Lingueo receives Funding

Guillaume, Arnaud and Johann, the three congenial founders of the language teaching platform Lingueo just sent me the great news that they got their first funding of 500k Euros from three business angles.

To me it was just a question of time as the company had been selected by the French magazine “Challenge” as one of the top 100 start ups to invest in a couple of weeks ago.

Lingueo was up to now a bootstrapped company founded in 2007 by Guillaume Le Dieu de Ville, Arnaud Portanelli and Johann Querne. The guys put their own money in this company and took a lot of time and effort to develop the tools of the platform before they decided to get external funding.

Up to now the growth of the platform was purely viral. One source for new teachers and students is the monthly Polyglot party for university students in Paris. According to today’s press release the Lingueo team now plans to invest massively into marketing to make the service more widely known to the public outside their university network.

Lingueo targets one-to-one lessons only and prices start at 10 Euro per hour. Teachers have the possibility to present themselves with an introduction video and they can also upload video lessons to showcase their expertise. In fact the whole platform is built around the premise to be as visual and hence as simple as possible to use.

The platform is translated in 12 languages already and targets students and teachers from around the globe. Lingueo is also targeting the sign language market for a while now and it has been a success, so I think we can expect more in that direction as well.

From my talks with the guys I know that one of the next steps will be more quality control for the teachers who sign up for the service which will also (hopefully) result in an increase of the pricing structure.

I am really happy for the team as I not only like them on a personal level but also believe in their entrepreneurial skills. They are truly hardworking edupreneurs who bootstrapped this company over almost three years and built something that is equal to companies like Myngle or eduFire which received millions and are actually not really ahead of Lingueo today, neither technically nor from their user base. They even personally reconstructed an entire factory storey and made it their office. I think with ethics like this 500k can do the same for them like 5m for others.

If you would like to learn more about the Lingueo team you should watch my EDUKWEST interview I did with them when I visited their office in Paris below. I also scheduled an update with the guys so there will be a new one soon.

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