Industry Online education Headquarters London Type Privately held company | Website www.fluentify.com Founded 2013 | |
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Founder Matteo Avalle, Claudio Bosco, Giacomo Moiso and Andrea Passadori | ||
Fluentify
Fluentify is an online language tutoring website. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in London, United Kingdom, the company is privately owned and operated by Blinguo LTD. The platform offers online language classes with selected native speakers.
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History
Fluentify was founded in February 2013 and launched into public beta in May 2013. The same month, the company was selected to join London-based Accelerator Academy for three months of training. In March 2014, Fluentify announced that it had raised $410k in angel funding from the banker Stefano Marsaglia. Marsaglia is a prominent M&A banker, currently the co-head of corporate and investment banking at Mediobanca, Italy’s biggest publicly traded investment bank.
In July 2014 the company opened the first international office in Turin, announcing a plan to create a development hub in Italy and hire 20 developers in 12 months.
Working as a tutor
Fluentify runs on a marketplace platform model where it connects students and tutors and enables transactions without hiring any tutor individually. Unlike traditional language schools and online tutoring websites, Fluentify scales not by increasing its inventory or number of employees but by increasing the number of students and tutors and matching them with each other. The company claims that top tutors can earn up to £2,500 per month.
Media attention
In September 2013, the company was selected from more than 200 nominations to take part in the TechCrunch Competition in Rome. GiPStech, a startup that developed an advanced indoor positioning technology based on the world’s geomagnetic field, won the $50k prize. In January 2014 the company was shortlisted for the BT Infinity Lab program, a competition promoted by the British multinational telecommunications company BT Group.
Fluentify and its founders have received consistent media coverage in Italy. In April 2014 two of its founders were invited as guests in the prime time TV program Che tempo che fa, one of the most popular shows in Italy hosted by Fabio Fazio.
In May 2014, the monthly tech magazine Wired selected Fluentify as one of the 6 top tools to learn a language online.