The english language is the greatest asset for UK EdTech

This article first appeared in UK Tech News on 17 APR 2018.

There are 1.5 billion people learning English today, that’s 10x more than are learning French, Chinese, Spanish, German, Italian and Japanese combined.

The rise of global communication — the dominance of the Internet; the absolute ubiquity of feature and smartphones; and the growth of social media — has made English the world’s common language. Non-native speakers now far outnumber native speakers.

If English is the ‘operating system’ of global conversation, it’s more open Android, than closed iOS. It is being shaped by a billion new users across the world.

The British Council forecasts at least double digit growth — in some cases up to 40% — in demand for English in Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil and Mexico, as well as the large African countries, particularly Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan.

The current solution in these markets is often learning from non-native English speakers. This has predictably poor outcomes, and more than that simply doesn’t work at scale. And the digital English education tools haven’t kept up.

The largest online English education brands were built over a decade ago. They mostly look like it too. There’s a big opportunity here for the EdTech community. And it’s a community in need of a win — with researchers questioning the efficacy of many classroom based EdTech products and investor interest blowing hot and cold.

Take Memrise, founded by Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke in 2010. The language learning app teaches over 15 million people usings native speaker videos. To collect these videos, the Memrise team completed a 12,000 mile road trip across Europe on a 1970s double decker bus, and filmed 20,000 locals en route. But learning English, or any second language, is hard — even with the likes of Memrise to help. At three years old, a child has 100% more synapses than as an adult. By six years old, our brains start ‘pruning’ themselves and these synaptic connections become harder to create. Put simply: it’s much easier to learn a language before school age.

Toby Mather, an early intern at Memrise, founded a pre-school English company Lingumi in 2016. It teaches children aged two to five English before the ‘critical period’, after which native fluency and pronunciation is very difficult to achieve. The Club Lingumi app uses structured daily 15 minute lessons and has shown extraordinary learning outcomes so far. Lingumi is ahead of the market in three fundamentally challenging areas of language acquisition: accent change, language acquisition and phrase formation.

Today the company announced a £1.2m Seed round led by ADV, with support from us at LocalGlobe and Entrepreneur First. We are thrilled to be backing Toby, Adit, and the Lingumi team. English is the language of opportunity around the world, it is also an opportunity for EdTech founders.