Preply

The advantage of the platform is the ability to choose a tutor not only from local teachers, but also online tutors from almost any country in the world - the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and Poland. A variety of geographical and cost options are possible here: a student from South Africa living in Nizhny Novgorod may well teach English remotely.

You can pay for classes using the platform, the tutor determines the cost of the lesson on his own. Classes are held locally and by skype. Skype classes are popular and make up 70% of the total number of service orders. Depending on the qualification and city of residence, prices range from $1 and can reach $100 per hour. Preply takes 100% of the cost of the first lesson as payment to the service and provides a 100% guarantee of a refund or replacement of the tutor if the current one is not suitable. For each new lesson, a fee of 18-33% is charged, the loyalty program runs on the platform - the longer the teacher with Preply, the less commission he pays.

Initially, Preply helped find a local or Skype teacher only in English, soon the team added foreign languages, and from September 2015 on the platform you can find a tutor in any subject of the school curriculum or teacher for their own development (vocals, violin, piano, etc.).

The company plans to increase expansion in the developed countries of Western Europe, which in the short term will give access to a new audience of 700 million people.

History

2021: Attracting $35 million investment

In mid-March 2021, Preply, a Ukrainian-founded foreign language teacher search service, raised $35 million. Investors included Point Nine Capital, Hoxton Ventures, EduCapital, All Iron, Diligent Capital and Evli Growth Partners.

The current interest of investors is explained both by the general boom in the study of foreign languages ​ ​ and by the direct growth of Preply. In 2020, Preply had 2 million reserved lessons and 10,000 teachers. A year later, more than 10 million lessons were booked on the platform, and the network of tutors grew to 40,000 people in 190 countries.

Preply Raises $35 Million Investment

During the pandemic, Preply was able to develop and enter the US market, despite such large competitors as Duolingo and Babbel. CEO Kirill Bigay believes that the company was able to stand out among others thanks to unique technologies that use artificial intelligence to establish communication between students and teachers.

According to the developers, the advantage of Preply is that when selecting teachers, the service weighs more than 400 parameters based on the needs of the student. For example, Preply can connect a San Francisco student who likes to study in the evenings with a tutor in another time zone with convenient hours of work.

In addition, the creators of Preply believe that training should occur live, with a native speaker, while Duolingo, for example, uses gamified and independent training.

Customers believe that our way of learning a foreign language is much more effective than just applications for learning languages, "said Bigay.

Preply provides students with instruction in 50 different languages, including Spanish, English, French. In 2019, the company began to sell its products to large companies with offices around the world so that their employees could learn the languages ​ ​ of their colleagues and customers.^[1]

2016

Preply entered the markets of Spain and Mexico

On April 12, 2016, Preply announced the continuation of expansion in Europe and North America - Spain and Mexico became the regions of presence and operational activities of the company.

In the second quarter of 2016, the startup plans to begin work with Hispanic countries on two continents at once. Spain became the third, after Poland and Germany, country of the European Union, in which Preply conducts operational and marketing activities.

At the stage of entering the Spanish-speaking markets, Mexico is of great importance to Preply.

author = Kirill Bigay, co-founder and managing partner of Preply Preply is becoming a truly multi-national company. In our office, speech is heard in different languages, workplaces are decorated with flags of different countries, and national cuisine is often ordered for lunch - Russian, Polish, Brazilian, and recently also Mexican. I hope that very soon our table and cultural traditions will become even brighter and more diverse.

As of April 13, 2016, according to the company's statement, the service is fully localized into Spanish. In addition to the previously used currencies, the Mexican peso (MXN) is accepted as a means of payment. Residents of Spain can pay for the services of a tutor in euros, like other Eurozone participants.

Preply enters the Brazilian market

On the eve of the famous carnival in Rio, the educational platform Preply comes to America! Unlike the vast majority of startups, the company will begin its expansion overseas from the southern part of the continent. The hot summer in Brazil is not only the time for the world's most grandiose theatrical performance with incendiary samba a day in advance, but also the time for the start of the school year in most of the huge country.

Preply is one of the few startups that launched in Brazil. Among others, Joble and Depositphotos can be distinguished. In terms of GDP on the continent, this country is second only to the United States, ranking ninth in the TOP-10 largest economies in the world. Equally important for the successful development of the educational platform, Brazil is the fifth country in the world in terms of population - in 2014, 206.1 million people lived here (World Bank data).

About 300 teachers from the largest Portuguese-speaking state are already registered in the Preply database. Attracting trainees from Brazilian universities helps to find a common language with the local population.

The service is completely localized in Portuguese, the address of the start page: preply.com/pt/. Brazilian Real (BRL) is now accepted as a means of payment in addition to the previously used currencies. You can pay for the services of a tutor either by credit card or using an account in the PayPal system.

According to Statista, in Brazil, over 55% of the population has access to the Internet, and the share of the connected population continues to grow by about 5% per year. Despite the rather high level of Internet penetration, the country continues to maintain popularity and the traditional model, which involves personal meetings of the student with a tutor. To this end, the Preply platform implements a mechanism for searching for teachers located in the immediate vicinity of the zip code of interest.

Users from Brazil used the services of tutors on the Preply platform before. In particular, to learn English by Skype and search for speakers in the USA, Canada, Great Britain and Australia. Localization of the site opens a new degree of freedom, both for the inhabitants of the largest state of South America in terms of area and population, and for a multimillion-dollar army of Portuguese speakers around the world. Everyone else has a unique opportunity to start learning the world's sixth most common language.

2015: Preply begins to accept bitcoins to pay tutors

Preply, an Internet platform for searching for local and online tutors in foreign languages, exact sciences, humanities and various hobbies, joined the number of companies that are ready to accept cryptocurrencies as a means of payment in December 2015. The first transactions have already been committed.

The company Preply was the first in Russia to offer the opportunity to everyone who wants to pay for the services of tutors around the world with the help of bitcoins (BTS). Users of the platform will receive at their disposal another modern payment tool. At the same time, the use of cryptocurrency significantly expands the opportunities for business development, allowing the provision of services in regions with limited access to traditional payment tools.

The first payment by cryptocurrency was recorded at the rate of 320 US dollars or 20 771.84 rubles (in terms of the rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation) for one bitcoin at the time of the transaction. The payment was successfully verified, and the student received the ordered tutor services in full.

An important advantage of cryptocurrencies for marketplaces, one of whose representatives is Preply, is the possibility of reducing fees for making payments. For example, fees for accepting funds in Braintree, PayPal, Stripe systems are 2.5-2.7%, for withdrawing to Payoneer, PayPal, Skrill - 2-3%. At the same time, commissions when working with bitcoins are voluntary and may be completely absent. The issue is especially acute when you have to process transactions in regions with especially high banking commissions, in particular, this applies to individual Asian countries.

In one month alone, the Preply educational platform holds about 10,000 hours of classes - over 42,500 users found a teacher and raised their level of knowledge, and about 15,000 registered tutors received the opportunity to earn additional money globally. Currently, 27 languages ​ ​ of the world, 13 popular school subjects, as well as classes in acting, music and drawing are available for study.

first time, we thought about the idea of ​ ​ taking bitcoins to pay for services even at the beginning of the Techstars acceleration program in Berlin. Then there was a unique opportunity to talk with representatives of the largest venture capital fund in Europe, Point Nine Capital, which invested in the well-known BlaBlaCar travel companion search service. We were recommended to test the possibility of working with cryptocurrencies, "said Kirill Bigay, co-founder and managing partner of Preply. "As a result, we expect not only to improve business indicators, but also to attract a technical audience to the platform or, simply put, geeks."

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