Language-learning platform Preply has raised a $150 million Series D round led by WestCap, pushing the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion and officially making it a unicorn. The raise is yet another vote of confidence for founder Kirill Bigai’s long-held belief – shaped by his own struggle to learn English – that language learning works best when people teach people.
More than a decade in the making, Preply’s human-first bet is paying off
Preply began in 2012 with a simple frustration. After moving from Ukraine to the US, Bigai realized that years of studying English hadn’t prepared him for everyday conversations. He could follow parts of what people were saying, but speaking confidently – and naturally – was another challenge altogether.
Bigai traced the problem back to rigid, exam-focused learning methods that left little room for real conversation. Together with Dmytro Voloshyn and Serge Lukyanov, he set out to build something different. Their idea was pretty straightforward, with a goal to connect learners with real tutors for flexible, personalised lessons focused on speaking, not just studying.
More than a decade later, that founding insight has grown into a global marketplace. Preply now connects students with over 100,000 tutors teaching more than 90 languages to learners in roughly 180 countries. The company employs more than 750 people across multiple international hubs, but the core mission to boost confidence remains the same.
How their human-first approach works at a global scale
After more than a decade of building through turbulent shifts in technology, markets, and expectations, Preply’s rise reflects a kind of founder resilience that’s easy to overlook in the age of overnight success stories. In a tech world increasingly focused on automation, the company’s bet – and real progress – has stayed remarkably consistent.
Unlike many language apps that rely on self-guided lessons, Preply puts live, one-on-one instruction at the center. The company describes its approach as “human-led, AI-enabled” – while tutors remain the core of the experience, the AI works quietly in the background.
For learners, it means lessons that feel more personal and consistent over time, rather than starting from scratch every session.
WestCap’s latest decision to lead the Series D reflects growing confidence in platforms that combine human expertise with AI, rather than choosing one over the other. With the new backing, Preply plans to keep building tools that better match students with tutors, simplify lesson planning, and support learners over time.
But no matter how busy the build gets, the company says its core mission will remain the same as it was in the early days – only the scale in which it now operates has changed.
