San Francisco and Madrid (PRWEB) November 23, 2016
The launch follows a recent wave of big moves in the online education market. Amazon recently introduced Amazon Inspire, a platform that organizes educational resources in a user-rated directory. Another big project was recently announced by Google’s Rich Miner, co-founder of Android, whom embarks on a new stealth educational project. Also notable in the early childhood EdTech space, VIPKID, a communications marketplace that connects American teachers with Chinese kids, announced a $100m funding round that follows ABCMouse’s recent $150m round at $1b valuation earlier this year.
Lingokids, which counts close to 1M registered families worldwide, has been beta-testing its new format since July. Following their launch earlier this year, the adaptive language learning platform has been growing over 25% month-over-month in terms of both registered users and revenues. Now with this partnership, Lingokids will offer Vodafone clients the ability to pay for their subscriptions via their mobile phone bill while enjoying additional exclusive benefits.
The partnership comes at an exciting time for the company as they are accelerating growth and product development. Vodafone users will be able to enjoy access for their children to the recently launched Lingokids "Guides" that offers users a fun and immersive English learning experience while tracking their performance and dynamically adapting lesson difficulty based on machine learning.
Recognizing that children form deep relationships with adults, such as Bob McGrath of Sesame Street and Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Lingokids chose to bridge the gap between children and gameplay in a similar way by introducing real-life teacher figures in the experience.
“The power of this new format is that we combine clips of real-life teachers together with interactive activities, such as games, videos and traceables in a seamless stream of activities. Most learning platforms don’t create an emotional connection with the child, despite research showing that children learn better from people with whom they have an emotional relationship with. With Guides we’ve created a format where the emotional bond created by the storytelling of the teachers drives the learning experience. It builds a safe, familiar learning environment for children during the most critical stage of their development: early childhood,” said Jens Peter de Pedro, Experience Director at Lingokids.
We’ve all seen children as young as ages 2 and 3 using mobile devices skillfully. Parents love the idea of their kids learning and playing at the same time, but most of them have been telling Lingokids that they didn’t like the lack of a human connection. “We didn’t want to create a simple directory of educational resources or a communications marketplace. Guides is human from an emotional point of view and smart from a machine-learning recommendations point of view,” says Cristobal Viedma, CEO.
About Lingokids
Lingokids, a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2014, develops a mobile service to learn English for kids ages two to six. Their language learning platform is available by subscription from $90 a year. Lingokids has offices in San Francisco and Madrid.
Lingokids has raised $1.2 million in seed funding to date from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Japan’s SHOzemi Innovation Ventures, and angel investors such as Carina Szpilka, VP of Unicef, and Gwynne Shotwell, President & COO of SpaceX.
Sources:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/03/vipkid-nabs-100m-to-link-chinese-kids-with-native-speakers-to-learn-english/
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/03/age-of-learning-a-quiet-giant-in-education-apps-raised-150m-at-a-1b-valuation-from-iconiq/