Speak
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2016CEO / Founder
Connor ZwickEmployees
201-500Funding
Series C — $162MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.6/10Website
www.speak.com/
Profile updated
About Speak
Speak, operated by Speakeasy Labs, Inc., is an AI-powered language learning platform founded in 2016 by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu and headquartered in San Francisco, California. The platform enables learners to practice conversational fluency through real-time AI voice interactions, replacing traditional drill-based methods with dynamic two-way dialogue.
The Speak app, available on iOS, Android, and web, teaches English, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The platform recorded over one billion spoken sentences from users in 2024 and serves both individual subscribers—at $20 per month or $99 per year—and enterprise customers through Speak for Business, which had over 200 corporate accounts as of late 2024.
Speak has raised $162 million in total funding across seven rounds, including a $27 million Series B led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, a $16 million Series B-2, a $20 million extension at a $500 million valuation, and a $78 million Series C led by Accel in November 2024 at a $1 billion valuation. The company employs approximately 294 people and counts Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, and the OpenAI Startup Fund among its investors.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Speak
All products by Speak reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Speak
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Speak's product on their own terms. They disagreed by 1.3 points — The Finance Lead was the hardest to convince, The Power User the most positive.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Speak competes with, and how they differ.
Duolingo (incl. its GPT-4-powered Max tier) is a far larger, broad gamified curriculum covering reading, writing, listening and speaking across 40+ languages on a freemium/ad-supported model; Speak is speaking-only, leads every lesson with open-ended AI voice conversation rather than gamified drills, and sells a flat-rate subscription concentrated on intermediate-plus conversational fluency, especially in Korea and Japan.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedELSA Speak specializes narrowly in phoneme-level pronunciation drills (identifying mispronounced sounds and coaching mouth/tongue position) rather than open-ended dialogue, and prices around $7-12/month; Speak's AI tutor instead holds free-form spoken conversations across everyday topics at roughly double that price point.
Preply is a marketplace connecting learners with live human tutors at $10-35/hour with no standardized curriculum, rather than an AI-only app; Speak substitutes an always-available AI conversation partner for a human tutor at a flat monthly subscription, the human-tutor replacement Speak explicitly positions itself against.
Company Timeline
Key milestones in Speak's history, with sources.
- Milestone
Speak surpasses $100M in annualized revenue
Speak crossed $100M in annualized revenue, reported by Forbes as likely the first AI-powered language-learning company to reach that mark, while its enterprise business grew past 500 corporate customers including KPMG and HD Hyundai.
finance.yahoo.com - Launch
Speak launches in the United States
Following growth in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, Speak expanded into the U.S. consumer market in June 2025.
finance.yahoo.com - Funding
Series C -- $78M led by Accel, valuation reaches $1B
Speak raised a $78M Series C led by Accel, with the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator participating, doubling its valuation to $1B in six months and bringing total funding to $162M.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series B-3 -- $20M led by Buckley Ventures, valuation doubles to $500M
Speak raised a $20M Series B-3 extension led by Buckley Ventures, with the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures, Paul Graham and Jeff Weiner participating, doubling its valuation to $500M and bringing total funding to $84M.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series B-2 -- $16M led by angel investor Lachy Groom
Speak raised $16M in a Series B-2 round led by angel investor Lachy Groom, with Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi participating, bringing total funding to $63M; the round funded expansion to roughly 20 countries including Japan, Taiwan, Germany, France, Brazil and Mexico and a planned U.S. launch by year-end.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series B -- $27M led by the OpenAI Startup Fund
Speak raised $27M in a Series B round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Justin Mateen, Gokul Rajaram and Founders Fund participating; the company then operated from San Francisco, Seoul and Ljubljana with about 40 employees.
techcrunch.com - Launch
Speak launches in South Korea, becomes its primary growth market
Speak launched in South Korea in 2019; by mid-2024 the app had reached nearly 6% of the South Korean population, its single largest market.
speak.com - Founded
Speak founded by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu
Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu, who met as Thiel Fellows, founded Speak (legal entity Speakeasy Labs, Inc.) in San Francisco in 2016.
techcrunch.com
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