Our History

"Upon returning to Oxford, I began researching whether a parent, who can’t speak English, could teach their child a foundational level in English before they reach six years old, if they had the right tools"

Toby Mather

Founder & CEO of Lingumi

2014 - 2015:

On his year abroad from Oxford, where he was studying Modern Languages, Toby spent thousands of hours teaching primary school children the basics of English in big groups, and at high cost, in Russia and Italy. Upon returning for his final year at Oxford, Toby dedicated himself to researching early language acquisition, learning that pre-school children are neurologically substantially better language learners, and that technology could unlock the ability for parents to help their children build the foundations of English before arriving in their first classroom. You can read more about how the idea was formulated here.

Hey! I'm

Toby

Late 2015:

Birth of Lingumi and introduction to co-founder Adit through Entrepreneur First. You can find out more about their story here. We were able to get children speaking English from very early on through our app which was called "Lingumi Play Words"; the results were incredible:

Late 2015:

2016:

We raised our pre-seed investment round from LocalGlobe, Europe's top Seed VC Fund, based on paper prototypes and a big dream! We built out a production prototype fast, selling our first sets of products (the 'Learning Cubes', now discontinued) to our first 500 German customers. We saw great efficacy of learning outcomes, but no sense of Product-Market Fit at this stage, and no clear strategy to get there....yet.

2017:

We continued ramping up sales of our cubes while playing around with various business models. We opened our first successful market in Taiwan, but was spending too much money marketing the product globally that wasn't yet at 'product-market fit'. We tried to launch in too many markets and this was a mistake. We should have spent longer establishing product-market fit with a key focus on Taiwan before spending marketing money globally!

2018:

We decided to discontinue the sales of our cubes: they were wonderful for customers who had them, but very hard to explain to customers who didn't...a lesson learned in simplicity in marketing! We converted the app into a digital-only, subscription first learning experience, and our retentive, adoring early cohorts of users helped us raise our Seed round, led by ADV in the UK. That £1.2m was designed to power us through 'finding product market fit' and get us to our Series A, growth round. We spent the second half of the year focusing on the core product experience, and Toby moved to China to set up a local company on the ground, and hire our China Market Manager, so we could begin to prepare to launch in the world's biggest market for EFL...

2019:

We launched Lingumi in China, doubling down on our growing user-base in East Asian markets. We focused hard on the core teaching & learning experience on the app, and started growing fast. We opened offices in Shenzhen and Singapore and raised an investment round of £4mn from North Summit Capital, Local Globe and ADV.

2020:

We are growing faster than ever before and moving from a single course application to a multi-course platform. This will enable the world's best teachers to teach critical skills to children all around the world, asynchronously. We are growing our team, focusing on finding individuals who care deeply about our mission and will add to our Lingumi DNA

2017:

2018:

2019

2020

Our Way of Working

Take a look at the processes and guidelines Lingumi has in place to help create a productive and creative environment to allow our team to work to the best of their abilities.
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