Owl Ventures, Full in Partners lead $35m round for Preply

Previous backers Point Nine Capital, Hoxton Ventures, EduCapital, Diligent Capital, Evli Growth Partners and All Iron Ventures also participated in the round, alongside several business angels, including Niklas Ostberg, Arthur Kosten and David Helgason.

Previous funding
Following an initial investment from Vostok Ventures and angel investors Semyon Dukach, Borya Shakhnovich and Vadim Yasinovsky, Preply raised $118,000 from Techstars in 2015.

Subsequently, the startup received $1.3m from Hedgehog Fund and other investors in 2016.

Berlin-based VC house Point Nine led a $4m funding round for the business in July 2018. Additional investors in the round included RTAVentures VC, Diligent Capital Partners and Ukraine-based SMRK.

More recently, Hoxton Ventures led a $10m series-A funding round for Preply in April 2020.

The round also saw participation from Point Nine, All Iron Ventures, The Family, EduCapital, Diligent Capital and a number of angel investors, including Arthur Kosten of Booking.com; Gary Swart, former CEO of Upwork; David Helgason, founder of Unity technologies; and Daniel Hoffer, founder of Couchsurfing.

Hoxton deployed capital from its second fund, which invests up to $5m in European tech companies.

Company
Founded in 2012, Preply is an online learning platform that connects students with private language tutors remotely via online chat. It allows users to learn 50 different languages with the help of a tutor able to track their progress.

The company claims to have tens of thousands of users in 190 countries worldwide. It offers a network of 10,000 tutors available online and employs 125 staff.

Preply is headquartered in Kiev, with further offices in Barcelona and Berlin.

People
Preply – Kirill Bigai (co-founder, CEO).

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• Topics
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