Language Confidence secures $1.5m Seed funding to automate spoken English testing

Australia-based startup Language Confidence announced a $1.5 million (A$2.05 million) Seed round to automate the teaching and testing of spoken English.

The capital raise was led by Wavemaker Partners, one of Southeast Asia’s leading early-stage venture capital firms, with participation from Investible, a leading Australian early-stage investment group. The funding will enable the company to expand its product offering and grow it’s already global customer base.

The Australia-based startup is on a mission to provide democratic and affordable access to quality language education for anyone, delivering automated teaching and testing of spoken English using AI technology.

Language Confidence offers an API (plugin) that ‘listens’ to students and can assess and correct their spoken English pronunciation with visual feedback. This API can be plugged into any digital platform and enhance spoken products’ engagement, retention and student’s learning.

Its API product has attracted customers from the high-stakes test preparation, B2B and corporate English, general English, direct-to-consumer (app) and the learning-assisted (i.e. dyslexia) markets.

Language Confidence also provides an automated English test, which is offered as a white-labeled platform to be used for a wide range of purposes, including mock high-stakes testing, placement testing, diagnostic testing for universities, schools, online platforms and even governments.

Nick Jenkins, Co-Founder and CEO of Language Confidence, who has previously sold one business at 21 years old and also founded another EdTech startup, began formulating the idea for the product during the nearly four years he spent living and teaching English in China.

“There are 1.4 billion people spending US$60 billion trying to learn English, and there simply aren’t enough teachers to go around,” Nick said. “I wanted to automate and scale what I was doing as a real human teacher with a focus on speaking. There is a huge opportunity to unlock universal access to the English language by leveraging artificial intelligence.”