American dream startup LinguaLeo comes true! Runa Capital has invested $ 3,000,000 in a service for learning foreign languages!

The story of LinguaLeo is similar to a roller coaster: idea, team, tropical start, liquidity crisis, chance meeting and angel investment, waiting for results, winning the BIT 2011 competition, getting to self-sufficiency, searching for six months and interviewing investors for going international, term therm , 5 months of approvals, and ... the deal of the century took place!

And now more ...

To start the video for those who do not know what LinguaLeo looks like now:

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And one more video about how it all began (an old Thai movie):


We have already talked about our initial plan to attract 2 million euros of investment from a strategic investor at the very start, which failed miserably. We thought that everything would be right away. After all, we have such a cool idea ... But the journey to venture capital investment has been delayed for two and a half years! During this time we have learned a lot, have experienced a lot and become stronger and smarter as a team. Here you have the whole story!

How did LinguaLeo find $ 3,000,000 venture capital investment?

After the long-awaited launch of the service from the Thai island, we returned to Moscow. At this point, we ran out of money, because the initial monthly revenue plan was not justified. And it doesn't matter, because we were about to receive investments for further development, but our expectations hit a wall of strategic misunderstanding even after a successful release.

I had to freeze the project for 6 months. All this time, LinguaLeo lived only on the enthusiasm of users. No development. Only accounting, support service and fix critical bugs.

But in the fall of 2010, the Perm Youth Innovation Convention was held in Perm. Ainura, the founder of LinguaLeo, was invited to tell the success story of the student project “Club of Native Speakers”. Alexey Odin, the very first developer of LinguaLeo, lived in Perm (in the video above - in a cast and with crutches). The guys met, and after a significant conversation in the billiard hall of the hotel where the conference was held, they decided to attract subsidies or investments in the project. We arrived in Moscow, won the “Start” competition, met a coffee break with Yegor Rudi from “ Your tutor ”, his partners Igor Ryabenky, Sergey Kuznetsov, and received angelic 200 thousand dollars from these wonderful people. The team gathered again, we were already 8 people, six months later we became profitable (shock!) And even won the BIT competition (shock!) In Russia, the freemium SaaS service, and even educational, became profitable ... BIT is the most respectable innovative competition tech startups.
So offers to meet us from venture investors came down to us.
The first was Runa Capital : they met at their office in Tsvetnoy, they were pleasantly surprised by the strong team and nice talk. Conclusion - they are good ... But then we did not agree on conditions.

Then they decided to bypass all Russian venture funds: the conclusion is that in Russia there are few good ventures! Then we went to the States, talked with Spielmann from the Start Fund, representatives of August Capital, Accel, TMT Investments and others. Conclusion: they are far away and will not be able to help a Russian startup well (time zone, crisis of distrust, distance) ...

Returned to Russia - suddenly Belousov invited us to meet them on December 29th. Need to go! There they met Ilya Zubarev, a partner of Runa Capital, he clutched his teeth, and in a day and a half, on December 30th, we signed Term Sheet with Runa. This is a grasp, we thought, and we came to the conclusion that such a persistent person is definitely needed by our team.

We were given a bridge-loan (formally, a loan before the principal amount of the transaction) for 300,000 dollars. We began to carefully invest money in business. It is rumored that in Russia therm-shit is far from a deal. But Runa began to help immediately. Meetings, acquaintances, introducing us to different good people, asked many questions, including inconvenient ones. It was especially important for us that this is a team of successful entrepreneurs, the founders of world-famous companies Parallels, Acronis, Alawar, Acumatica, Begun, United Internet, Softline, GoDaddy, DrWeb, Fotolia, Softkey. And, of course, it was a great discovery for us how much time the foundation partners are willing to spend on the development of our project.
Conclusion: we want to work with them!

Now on the LinguaLeo service there are about 1 500 000 Russian-speaking registered users from Russia, the CIS and foreign countries. This year we plan to localize the service into new languages, introduce several new languages ​​for learning (Spanish? Italian? German? French? - which one do you prefer?), Add a lot of new workouts, opportunities for live communication and new interactive courses on LinguaLeo.

The venture fund team Runa Capital believed in us and invested $ 3,000,000, hundreds of hours of work of its partners and experts to implement these plans!

What does the LinguaLeo team dream of?

There are 4 or 5 well-known Russian companies in the world (created by Russian teams) that have become globally competitive abroad: Abbyy, Parallels, Esset, Kaspersky, Badoo.

We dream that LinguaLeo will be on a par with these projects and help people from all over the world learn not only English, Russian and other languages, but also understand that it is possible in Russia to create a competitive technology company whose product helps millions of people from different countries of the world. learn to understand each other!

Why is it so important that our dreams come true?

Because people who speak the same language with foreigners are more likely to get to know each other, fall in love, create families, and build a business. They are less likely to fight, do not understand or blame each other. They are more mobile, successful and developed.

As Gabrielle Lockwood's grandmother used to say (he is a wonderful English teacher, actor and our friend): “As many as you can,” a person is as many times a person as he knows.

We're going to whack and work like devils!

Meanwhile, the entire development team of LinguaLeo left for a working trip to Montenegro for 2 months to release the most important releases. In the last week before the trip, everyone reread the works of the authors of methods for the study of languages, behaviorists, game designers, authors of various product, developmental and methodological know-how.



Even Nikita Filippov from ScrumTrek was called to do everything with the latest flexible processes (MVP, WoZ, Scrum). After all, in order to make the most convenient and popular web service for learning and practicing foreign languages, we all need to be experts in these matters. And now we also invite to our team of strong developers who want to create a high-quality product: http://lingualeo.ru/job . More information about Montenegro, our work and life here and the project news will be discussed in the following posts. Something is happening here!

Thanks for the support!

We want to say many thanks ! Our users, sympathizers, fans and critics, all the experts and authors of books on the study of foreign languages, all psychologists and game designers we study, everyone who told and tells about LinguaLeo to his friends - LOW TO YOU!

Write to us, check vacancies , use iPhone and WinPhone applications, follow us on Twitter , Facebook and Vkontakte , develop and visit LinguaLeo more often to keep your English in good shape!