English learning platform SpeakX has raised $16 million in a funding round led by WestBridge Capital, founder and CEO Arpit Mittal told ET. The round also saw participation from Elevation Capital and Goodwater Capital, along with angels Ronnie Screwvala of Upgrad and Shyamal Anadkat of OpenAI.
SpeakX was earlier known as Yellow Class — backed by the likes of Elevation Capital and India Quotient — and the startup focussed on children’s extra-curricular activities. However, a post-Covid slump forced the Gurugram-based company to pivot last January into its current avatar, where it deploys generative AI to offer spoken English tutoring.
The round values SpeakX at $66 million post-money, up from $25 million when it last raised $6 million as Yellow Class in 2021.
Mittal said that Yellow Class performed well during Covid but struggled to gain traction as the pandemic receded. “The hard pivot came at a cost. I had to bring down my team from 200 to 20. We had about $1.5 million left and my cofounder also decided to move out,” he said.
Anshul Gupta, with whom Mittal had cofounded Yellow Class, left the startup in 2022.
“After the pivot, raising capital seemed very far-fetched because we had zero revenue. We had to start the entire journey from scratch. Our first goal was to make the company profitable, as there was no clarity on when funding would come or how to manage the business with the burn,” Mittal said. This was also the period when there was a funding crunch in the edtech space as the sector was struggling to recover from the Byju’s fallout, the most valuable startup at one point (now valued at zero). Several firms like Unacademy and Physicswallah were also transitioning to the offline space post covid.
Post the advent of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI), Mittal said, the company saw an opportunity in the language learning space. However, Mittal wasn’t alone. A flurry of language-learning apps that use AI have come up over the last two years. These include Unacademy founder Gaurav Munjal’s Airlearn, and Lightspeed-backed Stimuler, besides global players such as Duolingo, which witnessed increased traction.
“This space looks crowded because before gen AI, language learning relied on human tutors costing at least Rs 500-1,000 an hour, making it unaffordable in India and other developing markets. With gen AI, this problem finally has an accessible solution, which is why you are seeing a lot of movement in the language learning space,” he said.
SpeakX will use the capital towards improving its technology, expanding its team, and adding more regional language support, he said.
Currently, 70% of SpeakX users are Hindi-speaking and over the next year, the platform plans to roll out support in Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, and other regional languages.
He said that the company has scaled rapidly — from clocking Rs 25 lakh in revenue for the month of September 2024 to Rs 5.3 crore in September this year. It currently has over 2,00,000 paying subscribers, most of which are in the income bracket of Rs 12,000-50,000 a month.
“English speaking is closely tied to doing well in life, as it directly affects job prospects. It is also closely linked to social identity. Because of these factors, people have a strong desire to communicate well in English. This aspiration is particularly high among the middle and lower-middle classes in India,” Mittal said.
Commenting on the investment, a statement by Sandeep Singhal, managing partner at WestBridge Capital, said, “Language proficiency continues to be a key driver of economic mobility. SpeakX’s AI-native platform is opening new pathways for millions of learners to overcome barriers with speed and scale.” WestBridge Capital has backed others in the edtech space, such as PhysicsWallah and Lead School.
