How Speak Built a $1B AI Language Learning App
with Connor Zwick — Cofounder & CEO
Speak reinvented language learning by getting users into real conversations with AI voices — and became a billion-dollar app. Connor Zwick on the decade-long road there.
In this episode
- After dropping out of Harvard to pursue a Thiel Fellowship, Connor became very interested in deep learning along with another Thiel fellow named Andrew Hsu.
- After Connor and Andrew developed a speech recognition model that outperformed all of the existing models at the time, they realized that AI had the potential to revolutionize language learning, which led them to cofound Speak.
- From the beginning, Connor and Andrew believed there was a major gap in the language learning market around immersive language learning. Unlike Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, which focus on helping people learn vocabulary, Speak went all in on AI-powered voice right away to help students learn by speaking.
- For the first four years, Speak exclusively focused on English language learning in South Korea. This is a ruthlessly competitive market, with South Koreans spending 1% of GDP learning English, but this forced Speak to tune its model to be great at one language before the company decided it was ready to expand.
- Since international expansion was part of Speak’s DNA from day one, it allowed the company to expand quickly to other markets once it was ready to grow beyond South Korea. Today, Speak helps people around the world learn six languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. Based on this growth, the company recently raised a Series C at a $1B valuation.