Our Story • Company at a Glance • Open Roles • Life at Speak
Speak makes language learning apps that help you get real conversational practice without needing a live tutor on the other end. Our mission:
To teach the next billion people English and become the de facto way people learn languages.
English is the global language of business, culture, and communication. Being able to speak it fluently is one of the most transformative skills a non-native speaker can learn which is why over 1.5 billion people around the world are actively trying to learn right now.
The problem is that it's nearly impossible to learn to speak a language without constant access to a speaking partner. Grammar and vocab apps don't really help. You need to actually converse with someone. This is why virtually everyone fails unless they move to an English speaking country.
Speak is on a journey to fix this. We're creating an AI-powered experience that replicates the flow of a conversation, without needing a human on the other end. The goal is to make it radically more accessible to be able to have conversations in English and eventually help hundreds of millions of people gain fluency who otherwise wouldn't be able to.
We started on this journey over four years ago and we've still got a long ways to go. We're a team of around 40 people across our three offices in San Francisco, Seoul, and Ljubljana — thoughtfully adding new team members only when we think they can truly play a big role in our mission.
We've quickly grown to become the #1 English app in our first market, South Korea.
We began by exclusively focusing on South Korea, although we recently soft launched in our second market, Japan, and plan to go global soon.
We've thoughtfully raised $63m from some of the best investors on the globe.