Thanks @RashiShrivast18 for telling the @speak story! We’re pushing hard to make the world’s best AI language tutor available to everyone. Super excited for the slate of new feature launches coming later this year! Stay tuned. forbes.com/sites/rashishriva…

A special bit of silicon valley is that everyone is willing to help each other. Back in 2015, we pinged @karpathy for AI help and (within 2 min!) he offered to meet up w/ us the next day. One of a few formative convos that led to us doing AI research and starting @speak.

The day has finally come! @speak is no longer an English language learning app. You can now learn 🇪🇸 Spanish, 🇫🇷French, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷Korean, and 🇮🇹Italian as well! And I'm not talking about memorizing vocab in a dopamine machine, I'm talking about good old fashioned spoken fluency.

Fun fact: @speak has 65% brand recognition in South Korea and close to 10% of the population has used us to improve their English fluency. Was great talking to @bquazz on how we got our start there!

📈 @speak

Underrated OpenAI announcement that came out middle of night in SF: a new JP specific GPT-4 model. openai.com/blog/introducing-… Fixing the tokenizer for East Asian languages is a MASSIVE step up for the billions of potential end users w/ non Latin alphabet languages.

Excited to announce we raised more money and *finally* an imminent US launch! The way humans learn is being fundamentally reshaped with AI and we're excited for people in the US to experience what people in 20+ other countries already love. The interesting thing about this raise is that we had the opportunity to close a more traditional Series C, which would have involved a much larger amount raised and dilution. As a founder, it's super difficult to turn down more capital for your business. It's tempting to think about all the ways you could use it to hire more people, invest in new opportunities, etc. But ultimately we realized that an even stronger path to a higher quality business was to focus on sustainability earlier. Which is ultimately the path most beneficial to both our customers and employees too. More and more I'm seeing other founders do the same - it's a refreshing change! We're fortunate to have existing investors who are supportive of our long term vision to build a generational company. Thank you to @lachygroom, @bradlightcap at @OpenAI, @gokulr and more for all the support thus far. If you're interested in helping us build the future of learning using AI please get in touch! speak.com/blog/series-b-2

3 months in and #1 edu app in Japan!

1/ Excited to share that Speak raised a $27M Series B, led by the @OpenAI Startup Fund! We're on a mission to make learning a language 10x easier through AI. This partnership greatly accelerates that mission: