BlaBla, a YC-backed, language learning startup has just secured a sum of US $1.5 million in a seed funding round announced on January 14, 2021. The round was led by several prominent investors including Y Combinator, Amino Capital, Starling Ventures and Wayra X (the innovation arm of the telecoms giant Telefonica).
BlaBla is an online platform that specializes in teaching the English language with the use of short and thrilling storytelling videos targeted at learners in the Asian region. The app is designed to pass across information by utilizing TikTok-style videos in an effort to make learning more fun and excitable.
The application used by BlaBla comes with proprietary software capable of recognizing scenes, giving pop quizzes, processing speech recognition and providing third-party translation tools for generating subtitles. Due to the ease and simplicity of using the app, BlaBla’s growth in the Edtech sector has been increasing drastically. The app has 300-400 paid users currently and about 11,000 users weekly with 80-90% of its users based in China.
The proceeds of their latest seed round will allow BlaBla to expand in regions like Latin America and Southeast Asia. The funds generated will also prove useful in helping the startup achieve its goal of gaining 300,000 students by the year’s end and adding new features like pairing up learners based on their profiles and interests.
Another long-term ambition of BlaBla is to bring in teachers of other languages as well, thereby not limiting themselves to teaching English alone. This action would greatly affect the growth and development of the startup and set BlaBla on the path to becoming a world-class online language teaching platform.
The founder of the startup was originally from Taiwan before relocating to Shanghai in 2019. He made the move to establish BlaBla after working in Silicon Valley for over a decade. The global pandemic necessitated the need for remote learning practices which positively impacted the development of BlaBla. A year later, the startup was eventually selected by Y Combinator’s 2020 summer batch. In the words of Huang, the founder of BlaBla, “It was my eighth time applying to YC”.
Headquartered in the APAC region, BlaBla’s main point of operation lies in Shanghai, China. The startup was founded on December 12, 2019 by Angelo Kaichen Huang and has secured US $3.1 million total funding in 4 rounds. BlaBla ultimately aims to offer paid online language learning to service the global market.
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