YC grad’s AI-powered English trainer Fluently raises $2M in seed round

There are many resources for learning English, but not so many for near-English speakers who still need to improve their fluency. This description applies to Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and it was this that inspired them to create Smoothly.

Using AI, Fluently acts as a coach that provides users feedback and tips about their spoken English. This makes it much like ELSA and its AI speech tutor, in addition to online and offline one-on-one coaching solutions, but with the difference that Fluently builds its feedback based on listening to conversations.

Users can use Fluently to record and transcribe their conversations in real time, for instance when using Zoom at work. However, it’s also possible to practice with an AI trainer – “Ryan” for every day chats or “Kyle” for mock interviews, which are sometimes a priority for foreign candidates trying to land a job that requires advanced English speaking skills, as is increasingly the case.

The duo, scratching their heads, estimates that there are 84 million foreign employees in English-speaking environments. It’s hard to say how a lot of them would love to be more easily understood, nevertheless it’s probably a big enough area of interest, a growing, and a much less crowded space than ESL as a complete.

This potential market helped Fluently capture for Y Combinator Winter 2024and even before Demo Day to shut a $2 million seed round with participation Pioneer Fund, Venture Partners SIDand individual angels.

It didn’t hurt that Fluently leans heavily into the technical side of edtech, either. Of the distributed team of 4, three are engineers, Rebryk told TechCrunch. With a combined background in machine learning, he and his former college roommate have the type of backgrounds that excite today’s enterprise capitalists, with stints at Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.

It may come as a surprise that none of them are teachers, let alone pedagogical experts. But making a product that they themselves need gives them a bonus. For example, they know that people who find themselves already fairly fluent are more interested in an answer that may be used in the background and draws their attention only to the problems that need solving.

Another point is that Fluently desires to be a one-stop solution for higher speaking skills. Instead of accent, its goal is comprehensibility, and this includes improving pronunciation, grammar and pace, in addition to expanding vocabulary. Paraphrasing advice like Grammarly or Ludwig offers for writing could possibly be one other addition, Rebryk said.

In its current beta form, Fluently continues to be clearly in its early stages of development and isn’t crash-proof. However, for users who don’t mind sharing their bank card details to check out a free trial, it already gives a robust sense of what it might probably achieve. For example, I learned to pronounce “computer” higher, which may be very useful while you work in the technology industry. For at the very least some, it might be well worth the $25 monthly that Fluently plans to charge.

There’s also a side Fluently could take from Duolingo, in terms of helping users correct mistakes and track progress in a gamified way. That’s normally key to helping people follow their goals, and motivation to learn a language tends to ebb and flow. But reasonably than learning holistically, it wants to make use of technology to deal with a user’s specific struggles in moving from near-fluent to completely fluent.

One of the problems with personalization may be privacy, especially if an app is running in the background and has access to the microphone. For this reason, Fluently insists on informing users during onboarding that their privacy is guaranteed and audio is stored locally, encrypted and data shielded from third-party providers. In the latter case, the startup notes that “data sent to third-party AI providers for transcription is anonymized and is not used for training.”

Rebryk said that is partly possible due to the recent launch of Apple Silicon. This brings up one other limitation of the beta version: it is simply available on macOS. However, Fluently is already constructing a waiting list of users, which it would announce when the Chrome extension is prepared.

With that in mind, the seed round will help Fluently hire one other team member and have money to spend on marketing when the time is true, Rebryk said. “When you have a small team, you prioritize what to do first,” he said with a smile.