Sayeret Matkal veterans raise $22 million to teach the world English with AI
Loora says its app has more than 15 million users and annual recurring revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.
Loora, which developed an AI-powered English-learning app with more than 15 million users, has raised $22 million in a Series B round as the company’s revenue more than doubled and its annual recurring revenue reached tens of millions of dollars.
The round was led by Union Tech Ventures, with participation from vgames and existing investors Emerge, Hearst Ventures, and QP Ventures. The latest financing brings Loora’s total funding to $43 million.
The company plans to use the new capital to expand its workforce, with the goal of doubling its headcount to 60 employees within six months. The majority of its employees will be based at Loora’s offices in Tel Aviv.
Loora was founded by Roy Mor and Yonatan “Yonti” Levin, who met while enlisting in the IDF and served together in Sayeret Matkal. Mor is the company’s CEO, while Levin serves as CTO.
The two founded Loora to address a problem they saw in the global workforce: approximately 95% of the world’s population are non-native English speakers, while about 98.5% of employers in Western countries evaluate candidates’ English proficiency during the hiring process, according to the company.
For millions of people, English proficiency can be a prerequisite for career advancement, academic studies and access to new opportunities. But personalized, high-quality instruction remains expensive and out of reach for many learners.
Loora says its typical user is between 25 and 55 years old, with 72% using the platform to improve their career prospects. The company has also expanded into the B2B market over the past year, signing partnerships with more than 100 corporations, governments and universities worldwide. These organizations pay centrally for subscriptions for their employees or students.
The company also sees significant demand in the United States, where it targets immigrants who need to improve their English quickly.
Loora is attempting to use AI to make personalized English tutoring more accessible. While general-purpose AI models can converse with users and answer questions on a wide range of subjects, the company argues that they are not designed to manage the personalized and continuous learning process required for language acquisition.
Loora says it has built one of the world’s largest datasets of English-learning interactions, based on hundreds of millions of real conversations between learners and its system. The data allows the company to track which teaching methods contribute to persistence, improvement and language mastery, and to continually adjust each user's learning path.
The distinction, according to Loora, is between an AI system that can have a conversation and one designed to turn those conversations into a structured learning process.
The company’s usage data offers a glimpse into how learners incorporate the app into their daily lives. One user in Germany devoted about 40% of their conversations to politics. A user in India discussed 38 different topics across 49 conversations, ranging from water sports to philosophy. Another user practiced every day for 1,377 consecutive days without missing a session.
Loora says this flexibility is central to its approach. Rather than requiring users to follow a fixed sequence of lessons, the platform allows them to discuss subjects that interest them while using those conversations as opportunities to practice and improve their English.
“Those who already speak English tend to underestimate the scope of opportunities it unlocks,” said Roy Mor, Loora’s CEO. “For most of the world, English is the most significant gateway to advancement, a better job, university admission, or a completely different future.”
Today, users in countries including Mexico, Japan, Germany and Brazil can access the same AI-based English-learning service, Mor said, describing it as a service that once cost about $50 an hour for private tutoring but is available through Loora for about $10 a month.
