How Preply, a Ukrainian language learning service, attracted investments

Preply is a tutor marketplace for learning foreign languages online. You can also find teachers of physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics on this site.

Preply has three co-founders, Kirill Bigai and Dmitry Voloshin, and later Sergey Lukyanov joined the team. Now the team consists of more than a hundred people: a team of marketers, engineers and SEO-specialists.

The platform has more than 12,000 tutors from 185 countries. You can learn more than 50 languages. Classes can be booked at any convenient time.

Investments in the project

Kirill Bigai told the organizers of the growthmarketingstage conference in a podcast how to attract investments in the project at various stages. Kirill approached founders of large businesses and venture capitalists at every opportunity and offered to join the business. Attracting financing to a business is not an easy way; it is a whole strategy, and the pitching is an important part of it. The founders talked to a hundred investors before their first funding.

The project received its first investment in 2015 from the Polish entrepreneur Mariusz Gralewski. In 2018, they managed to raise $4 million from seven different investors.

The investments will help the project to strengthen in the U.S. and European markets, improve and develop the mobile application. Despite the fact that the main direction of the service - learning foreign languages, now they also attract tutors of other subjects: math, physics, biology. There are also plans to launch and develop new instruments: evaluation of completed assignments, the ability to monitor progress, and others.