Speak, an AI-driven language learning startup, has secured a $78 million Series C round, bringing its valuation to $1 billion. Led by Accel and with participation from major backers, including OpenAI’s Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures, and Y Combinator, this investment underscores the growing momentum in generative AI applications. Just six months ago, Speak had raised a $20 million Series B extension at a $500 million valuation.

“Speak has emerged as a standout player in consumer AI, demonstrating exceptional growth and market potential,” said Ben Quazzo, partner at Accel, who led the investment round and is joining Speak’s Board of Directors. “With its strategic expansion into global and enterprise markets, coupled with effective, personalized language learning at scale and an experienced team, Speak is well-positioned to dominate this new category.”

AI-first approach to language learning

Traditional language education often starts with reading and writing. Speak’s platform flips this model by focusing on spoken conversation first—mirroring how native speakers naturally learn. Using advanced AI tools, including OpenAI’s speech technology and large language models, Speak generates real-time, voice-driven prompts and evaluates user responses to build fluency and confidence. No human tutors are involved; machine learning and generative AI power everything from speech recognition to feedback loops.

A major market opportunity

With over 1.5 billion people seeking to learn English, Speak’s initial target is massive. To date, it has focused on teaching English from eight originating languages. The new funding will expand the platform’s language offerings to Spanish, French, and beyond, opening the door to a larger global customer base.

Though Speak doesn’t disclose active user counts, its app has been downloaded over 10 million times and has created 25 million personalized lessons for its users this year alone. The company reports daily usage of about 10–20 minutes per user. Subscription options run around $20 per month or $99 per year—significantly cheaper than traditional tutoring. An enterprise tier, Speak for Business, currently serves over 200 corporate customers.

Beyond traditional metrics and gamification

Unlike some competitors, Speak does not yet integrate with standardized language tests, focusing instead on real-world conversational ability. While the platform may add more “behavioral” features in the future—like subtle gamification to encourage practice—efficacy remains the priority. In the long term, Speak’s technology could evolve to provide more formal fluency assessments, but the goal is to maintain authenticity and effectiveness over test prep or gaming features.

With fresh capital and deepening partnerships—especially with OpenAI—Speak aims to refine its AI-driven experience. It aims to become a fully dynamic learning experience powered by its underlying learning engine, the latest LLMs, and major advancements in its speech technology.

As more language options and features roll out, the company aims to position itself as a leader in applying generative AI to language acquisition to reshape how people learn to speak new languages.

Nothing is better than seeing a lowly start­up succeed. They push the envelop, think outside of the box, and inspire. The game, however, can be tough to play. For innovators and techies who don’t necessarily have experience or funding, breaking through can seem impossible. This is why accelerators and incubators can be vital to success. They teach creators what and who they need to know. They offer money, office space and, of course, the ubiquitous Demo Day

In major hubs like NYC and London, the list of FinTech accelerators and incubators is seemingly endless. Berlin, Tel Aviv, Singapore and Hong Kong and other major cities also boast their own multitude of hubs. We’ve compiled a list of some of the top incubators and accelerators around the world. If you’re a start­up looking for guidance, or businessmen looking for some new connections, here’s who you absolutely must know:

Fintech Innovation lab is based primarily in NYC, but also operating in London, and Hong Kong. Fintech Innovation is an established name, working in conjunction with the Partnership Fund for New York City and Accenture. They held their first lab in NYC in 2010 and haven’t stopped since.

Their 12­week program is meant to share insight on the financial sector as well as get start­ups in touch with would­be clients and industry executives. They combine their leadership program with the chance to refine and test products with partnering firms. The results have been generally positive, including an alumni start­up that would later be acquired for $175 million. Their connections to big banks and names certainly pays off for them and their start­ups.

Alumni: Inktank, BillGuard and Standard Treasury

Barclays. Teaming up with Techstars, a mentorship driven accelerator, Barclays is on its third round and currently accepting applications. The last program saw seven out of their ten companies signing with Barclays. Their contracts and terms vary, but some of their companies have seen real paid contracts worth up to £100,000. The exchange includes six percent equity for £12,500 seed money and office space.

The fact that Barclays has been operating with Techstars since 2013, producing steady results specifically in the FinTech sector is part of the real appeal. Not to mention, showcasing their current startups to an audience of 400 CEOs, CIOs and investors. They have also opened up a NYC chapter, that is already in full­swing, with ten bright eyed start­ups in tow.

Alumni: Everledger, Post­Quantum, Aire

Also based in London, Seedcamp is easily one of Europe’s top accelerator programs. Starting with their Onboarding program, they cover an array of topics to get you thoroughly prepared. With continual Founder Feedback, they meet weekly to discuss and work through problems as well as define goals. They also boast their monthly Academy to follow up. Meaning, even when the program is over, start­ups still have access to workshops and masterclasses. With a US trip and Berlin week, Seedcamp provides a thorough background for start­ups of all kinds. Their portfolio holds over 138 companies and they are backed by over international thirty venture capital firms.

Alumni: TRData, Elliptic, Revolut

Y Combinator has been around since 2005, and is not limited to FinTech. However, being a general tech incubator definitely works to their advantage. They boast countless success stories and are often termed the most important incubator in the field of technology. With names like Dropbox, Reddit and Airbnb on their list of success stories, it’s hard to doubt the incubator giant.

Despite not being fully rooted in the finance­sector, FinTech start­ups from Y Combinator have also flourished. However, with success rates like theirs they are also speculated to have extremely low acceptance rates—perhaps as low as 3­5%. No one ever said getting into top programs was easy.

Alumni: Twitch, Reddit, AirBnB, Dropbox, Weebly, Airbrite, you get the idea…

Another big name in the US is sixthirty, managed by Jim McKelvey, co­founder of Square. Giving start­ups up to $100,000 in funding, this program focuses on a flexible schedule with only two days of proper “class” time per week. Here, you can share exactly what you’ve been up to and schedule to speak to the proper mentor for feedback and planning. So how can they afford to shell out $100,000? They don’t invest in as many companies as other accelerators; rather, they put their money where their mouth is. They prefer working with more mature start­ups that are at the business development stage, and have a working product. They focus mostly on business development, introducing start­ups to connections and potential customers, aiming to create real traction.

Alumni: Gremln, Data Simply, Upside

Tel Aviv is home to numerous accelerators, including a prestigious program from Citi. Then there is Elevator, backed by the Israeli Leumi Bank. They seem heavily focused on honest feedback and seem to become very invested in the start­ups they work with. They can make pretty weighty investments in companies they feel will flourish under their guidance. Acting as full strategic, operational and financial partners, getting chosen by Elevator means a lot more than just courses and lessons.

Alumni: LynxGuard, Moburst, BLender

Perhaps not as colorful as Elevator, Visa Europe Collab announced plans earlier this year to spread to Israel. Planting hubs in London and Berlin, Visa is looking to turn out great new tech and has the money to back it up. They intend to take on a minimum of 20 start­ups, and mature those products into Visa­ready services.

There is one name that repeatedly pops up in Asia: Startupbootcamp FinTech, Singapore. With the chance to collaborate with over 200 mentors, partners and investors, Startupbootcamp offers plenty of exposure. 10 start­ups receive roughly $18,000 to get industry experience. Focused on challenging founders and teams, Startupbootcamp is all about education. From how to work with banks, to being a good leader, and understanding your customer, Startupbootcamp appeals to the whole body, mind and soul of start­ups. Its recent Demo Day boosted some 600 attendees making it easily one of the largest in Asia. Plus, they’re one of the most wide­reaching programs with partners in over 30 countries and programs around the world.

Alumni: Kashmi, SkolaFund, BankGuard

Hold on to your horses, bright­eyed start­ups…

While there is plenty to learn from the great minds and mentors in accelerators and incubators, past participants also warn of being too eager. These programs are sometimes compared to university. The mentoring and networking work great wonders, but teams must be prepared. Don’t just choose an incubator because they’re willing to give you money. A Visa-­run incubator will certainly not be the same as a small, tight­-knit program. Secondly, professors and mentors are not gods. Always hear what mentors are sharing, but don’t expect them to know everything or do the real work. Events and speakers are great for learning, but they aren’t going to get your start­up of the ground: you are.

Bitcoin Exchange startup, Buttercoin is shutting down this week as they havent been able to generate new funding. Backed by investors included Google Ventures and Y Combinator, Buttercoin pulled in more than $1 million in funding in 2013. But then came the boom — with bitcoins soaring in value to well over $1,000 — and then the collapse in value to just above $200. Now most investors appear to be more interested in mainstream applications of Bitcoin’s blockchain technology than in the cryptocurrency itself.

Unlike most recent Bitcoin startups’ shutdowns owing to unscrupulous activities or loss of money, Buttercoin is solvent and will provide users with their balance in full.“With the dip in Bitcoin interest among Silicon Valley investors, we weren’t able to generate enough venture capital interest to continue funding Buttercoin.” they said in a statement.

“Buttercoin will be turning off our service on April 10th at 11PM Pacific,” the company said in a note on its website. “Be sure to move your bitcoins to another service and remove your dollar balances by Friday April 10th at 11PM.”

Buttercoin raised a total of $1.6 million from investors, including Google Ventures’ Kevin Rose and Chris Hutchins, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, Floodgate, Initialized Capital, Rothenberg Ventures and Switzerland’s Centralway, via its first early-stage investment fund.

(image credit: BTC Keychain)

Newbie mobile database vendor Realm has garnered $20 million in a Series B funding round led by existing investor, Khosla Ventures.

Founded 9 months ago, backed by 3 years of research, what Realm came up with is a new mobile database that runs directly on phones, tablets or smartwatches. A very small database (<1MB) that saves on a lot of coding, Realm can be added to an app, explains co-founder Alexander Stigsen, and has advantages like offline availability, speed, privacy and cost effectiveness, reports TechCrunch.

So far its clients include Fortune 500 companies, banks, healthcare providers, big-name startups, including Groupon, Buzzfeed, Intuit, Rite Aid, SAP, Zynga, Hipmunk, Coinbase, Expensify, Wahoo Fitness among others.

New investor Scale Venture Partners also participated and Andy Vitus of Scale Venture Partners along with David Helgason, founder and former CEO of Unity will join the board of directors. Total investment has now gone up to $29 million.

The Y Combinator-backed startup has a workforce of 21 and with the new funding will look to expand team and support as well as improve the products, bring Realm to more platforms, and work on packaging and selling the enterprise products & services.

Photo credit: pestoverde / Foter / CC BY

At a data science conference in Berlin last year, a panel discussion inevitably turned towards the hot topic of data science for social good. Many of the panelists offered the same platitudes that I’m sure countless of you have heard before; it’s an emerging field. Great innovation will eventually happen. The future looks bright for data science and philanthropy. But one retort (by Klaas Bollhoefer of the unbelievable Machine Company) stood out. It stayed with me. It’s been the basis of many subsequent discussions with data science professionals. His response was two simple words:

“Who cares?”

Bollhoefer was not dismissing the idea, or suggesting he himself doesn’t care. He was asking, “Who cares?” Who are these people? Who’s actually going to dedicate the time to changing the world with data science? It’s an uncomfortable truth, but a truth nonetheless. When we think of data science, we don’t think of charities, NGOs or civic organisations. We think of Facebook. We think of Google. We think of Palantir.

This isn’t a mental association that looks to be erased any time soon. For young graduates with data science skillsets, success is a desk in the Google campus. It’s a healthy paycheck from a world-renowned company, where their work has an impact on our everyday lives; even if that impact is making us click an ad. This is absolutely not to paint data scientists as somehow more selfish than the rest of us- the vast majority of people in any profession can’t and don’t put charity first. Many data scientists do take on side-projects, but the part-time nature of such initiatives stunts their progress. These unfortunate truths mean the people with the brains and the skills to change the world are dedicating most of their time to less meaningful and more profitable projects.

But the story isn’t all doom and gloom. There are organisations trying to change this. One such organisation is Bayes Impact, a non-profit group based out of San Francisco, aiming to bring together top talent from the world of data science to work on social problems. They made a big splash last year, launching with a $50,000 grant from Y Combinator and a burning desire to save the world. Now, close to celebrating their first birthday, they’ve put their name to an impressive roster of projects, including fuelling Parkison’s research, optimising San Francisco’s Fire Department and detecting fraud in microfinance.

As recent fellow Stephan Gabler told us, Bayes Impact want to “show people that data science can be used for more than selling ads.”

“The fellowship is based on the assumption that the biggest impact can be achieved by having people work full time on a project,” he explained. “We usually work in teams of two fellows on a diverse range of independent projects.”

“Bayes provides a very creative and inspiring atmosphere in which the fellows work on their individual projects, that they also manage by themselves. Everybody is experienced enough to work completely independently, but we also all share our knowledge and learn a lot from each other.”

Gabler wasn’t following a “path that had data science as a goal from the beginning”. Like many who go on to be prominent data scientists, it was academia, research and problem solving that first appealed to him, in particular the area of “quantitative analysis of complex systems”. His path followed the typical progression of many data scientists; academia, more academia, a prestigious job afterwards. “I did an undergraduate degree in cognitive science with a focus on computer sciences, neuroinformatics and AI. During a year abroad at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem I came in contact with computational neuroscience.

“After finishing my first degree I went to join the Bernstein Center of Computational Neuroscience in Berlin and graduated with a masters degree about two years ago. Directly afterwards I joined patience.io as a data scientist. Patience is an adaptive online learning platform that uses machine learning to personalize the learning experience of its users”- a job that harnessed his years of experience with cognitive and computer sciences. As a resident of Berlin, I can confirm it’s one of the cheapest western capitals. As a data scientist here, we can presume Gabler was living like a King.

But of course, this is the point in tale where Gabler’s story deviates from the norm. At the beginning of the year, he moved from Berlin to San Francisco to join the Bayes team. I was keen to understand why Gabler bucked the trend; to paraphrase Bollhoefer, why did he decide to care?

“I always wanted a job in which I could apply my skills to something meaningful,” he told me. “Thats why I joined patience.io after graduation because I believed that online learning can affect many people in a positive way. At Bayes Impact I have even more leverage to have direct impact on social problems.

“Additionally, San Francisco is not the worst city to live in.”

It may not be the worst, but it is one of more expensive. Thinkpiece after thinkpiece has been penned about the skyrocketing prices and gentrification around Silicon Valley and beyond. Gabler admits “The fellowship is not comparable to a salary at Google or Facebook, but it is enough to live on.” Of course, all of this costs money- Bayes Impact are currently holding a “philanthropic seed round”, asking the public and investors alike to donate to keep the brightest minds in the business working for the greater good.

I ask Gabler if he considers the field of data science for social good stunted by the fact so much of the top talent is steered away from passion projects by the tech titans and their huge salaries. “I see this problem, but thats exactly where Bayes Impact comes in,” he responds. “We provide people who are interested in working on social problems a platform where they can do this in an effective way.”

Of course, for those with a data science skill set who want to do some good, Bayes provide the perfect platform. Gabler is currently working on an organisation called Youth Villages. “They are a big non-profit organization with the goal to provide help to troubled kids, focusing on intra-family treatment”, he elaborated. “They are an amazing organization with over 25 years of experience.”

The link between this organisation and data science may not be immediately obvious, but rest assured Gabler & co. are definitely putting their expertise to good use. ” They sit on a treasure of medical records and we can help them making their treatment even more efficient by analyzing this data with the goal to of building predictive models based on the historical data. This can help us to personalize the treatment of these kids.”

Gabler’s work has a direct impact on the lives of troubled and disadvantaged children. If we can convince more of the best and brightest that this alone is more rewarding that any paycheck, data science for social good may have a future yet.

Image credit: Bayes Impact

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Sam Altman, the President of the seed-stage accelerator Y Combinator, has a thing or two to say about the development of the superhuman machine intelligence (SMI).

In a blog post, this week, he wrote : “The US government, and all other governments, should regulate the development of SMI.  In an ideal world, regulation would slow down the bad guys and speed up the good guys—it seems like what happens with the first SMI to be developed will be very important.”

In the past Altman has found technology to be ‘often over-regulated’, he stresses the need for regulation in this particular aspect of technology and offers broad guidelines to go about the same.

Considering that the first serious dangers from SMI will mostly arise when humans and SMI work together, Altman says, “Regulation should address both the case of malevolent humans intentionally misusing machine intelligence to, for example, wreak havoc on worldwide financial markets or air traffic control systems, and the “accident” case of SMI being developed and then acting unpredictably.”

Citing incidents of ‘trust breach’ that the US intelligence and the Government in general has been accused and sometimes found guilty of, in the last couple of years, he believes an separate body must convene to to bring about any action.

Altman pointed out the need for a framework to observe companies and groups capable of carrying out development of SMIs. He also said that through the development stage operating rules must be chalked out wherein the SMI can’t cause any direct or indirect harm to humanity, referencing Asimov’s laws of robotics.

“We currently don’t know how to implement any of this, so here too, we need significant technical research and development that we should start now,” he wrote.

Altman believes that the topic hasn’t yet gained the importance it deserves: “Part of the reason is that many people are almost proud of how strongly they believe that the algorithms in their neurons will never be replicated in silicon, and so they don’t believe it’s a potential threat. Another part of it is that figuring out what to do about it is just very hard, and the more one thinks about it the less possible it seems.  And another part is that superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably still decades away, and we have very pressing problems now.”

His concern is another in a string of related disquietude raised by the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

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(Image credit: John Williams, via Flickr)

“The thing we liked about Cambia, relative to other investors, is that they have a strong thesis around ageing,” said True Link’s CEO Kai Stinchcombe. “If you go into pick a fund on Sand Hill Road, they tend to be youth-centric. But if aging isn’t a big picture trend, I don’t know what would be demographically.” He added that two thirds of the bank accounts are held by people over 60.

Based in San Francisco, CA True Link is a provider of anti-fraud and scam protection services for caregivers of ageing adults. In response to a large number of older adults falling prey to telemarketers, unscrupulous products advertised on TV, sham charities, investment deals and such, True Link developed a True Link card which can be used to Block purchases at specific stores or merchant categories, easily set or adjust spending limits, receive alerts of suspicious charges, auto-reload from a linked account on a schedule or as needed.  One can authorise use at only specific stores and any suspicious activity at an unidentified location will be reported.

The service is $10 a month. Cards can be funded from a bank account or direct deposit, and True Link says the process takes less than five minutes to set up.

True Link was recently recognised as the top online tool for retirement planning and living by WSJ. Reported by Techcrunch, Stinchcombe said the card was almost “infinitely customizable.” You can put limits like up to $50 at specific stores like Target or on phone bills. True Link typically gets new customers through word of mouth, or through professional service providers like financial planners or geriatric care managers.

Kai Stinchcombe established the firm after his family discovered that his grandmother was writing upto seventy- five cheques to fake charities every month. It was set up to offer assistance to millions of elderly people being conned out of large sums of money in retirement savings without unreasonable amount of monitoring or their financial independence and pride being compromised.

He stated, “Our customers save about $195 a month on average and they use our card as a replacement about their checking account,” However, he didn’t disclose how many customers the company has. Stinchcombe is reportedly planning to expand to other kind of assets that they could protect, like people’s credit scores and their savings with this funding.

(image credit: Garry Knight)