Lingokids, a leading early learning platform, today announced $40M USD in funding. Launched in 2016, Lingokids is the playlearning™ app for children between 2 and 8 years old, helping more than 30 million families to expand their children’s vocabulary, improve their literacy and STEM skills, and develop important social and emotional skills in a fun, 100% safe, ad-free environment. Lingokids is dedicated to supporting parents in their child’s learning journey, giving them a parents portal featuring each child’s progress with weekly reports, curriculum overviews, activity timeline, as well as advice and tips for parents’ everyday lives through its Parents Community.
The Series C was led by an undisclosed investor, with participation from GP Bullhound and existing investors HV Capital and Ravensburger, among others. The funding will be used for further international expansion, development of new and engaging forms of content for kids, as well as global hiring, especially for the platform engineering and development teams. Lingokids has raised $65 million to date, reaching EBITDA positive in 2020.
“This is the next important step in our mission of helping parents and caretakers raise amazing kids and break down educational barriers to create equal opportunities for children across the world.” said Cristóbal Viedma, CEO and founder of Lingokids. “Quality, education options that parents can trust are more important than ever, and with these new funds and support from our strategic investors, Lingokids will be able to reach millions more families to help young children learn through the most impactful type of education there is at this age: play.”
During the pandemic, more than 65% of households with children reported the use of online learning and 68% of parents said they now rely on early learning apps to supplement their children’s education. As a trusted resource for educational and interactive content, Lingokids triplied its number of users since the beginning of the pandemic, and is poised to transform the early education market.
With this new funding, Lingokids will rapidly increase its international growth. In addition, it will continue its commitment to the creation of quality educational content, focusing on the development of activities related to STEM, and the learning of skills that many kids missed out on during the 2020/2021 school year like emotional intelligence, empathy and critical thinking. Lingokids will also develop new audio content in audiobooks and audio-exercises, focusing on topics related to mental health, mindfulness and meditation.
“Safe, digital options for early childhood education is a critical topic for parents worldwide. You can find many regional players in this space, but only Lingokids has established a fast growing and truly global business model with highly engaging proprietary and safe, ad-free content,” said Jasper Masemann, Partner at HV Capital. “Over the last four years HV has invested in every round Lingokids has raised. I could not be more excited to continue the journey with Lingokids to help millions more families benefit and scale a global edutainment platform.”
Per Roman, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at GP Bullhound, added: “The pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of education and we are seeing a huge momentum in the edtech sector. With this new investment we are proud to support Cristóbal Viedma and the great team at Lingokids on their mission to break down educational barriers and create equal opportunities for children across the globe.”
With its previous investment last year, Lingokids also joined forces with the internationally known toy and puzzles company, Ravensburger. Lingokids and Ravensburger will develop merchandising and new games and toys offline to complement Lingokids’ online activities.
Lingokids also plans to hire an additional 60 people around the world this year, adding to its team of close to 100. The latest additions to Lingokids include Vladimir Klimov as Director of Content Strategy, with experience strategically scaling international companies such as Deezer; and Tiago Pregueiro, former Product Director at Cabify, as VP of Product.