A startup popular in China for teaching toddlers English says it's seeing a spike in interest from locked-down nations

Lingumi

Toby Mather, founder and CEO of Lingumi

• Edtech startup Lingumi is an online learning platform for teaching English to toddlers.
• It is backed by China's North Summit Capital and was once targeted by Chinese scammers thanks to the high demand for English tutoring in Asia.
• The startup says it's now seeing unexpected interest in Western Europe, as locked-down families find ways to teach toddlers
• "We're hiring aggressively and scaling up," Toby Mather, cofounder and CEO of Lingumi told Business Insider in an interview. "Parents are realizing the importance of their children learning English, and we believe that technology can radically improve the core teaching experience."
  
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UK education startup Lingumi has been booming in China and elsewhere as the coronavirus lockdown forces parents to explore online learning resources for children.

Lingumi is an English-language learning platform for children aged between two and six years old, and was built out of the UK. It is jointly headquartered in Cardiff and London.

With schools across China and Europe now closed as a result of the coronavirus, the startup says demand has been increasing.

"China is by far our most popular market, and our user base has doubled there over the past two months," Toby Mather, cofounder and CEO of Lingumi told Business Insider in an interview.

English tutoring is in high demand in Asia

According to iResearch, the size of the online youth English training market in China is around 1.97 billion RMB ($280 million) with an annual growth of 45.4%. With the Chinese population growing, it's projected to become a 5 billion RMB ($707 million) market in the next two years.

Around 50% of Lingumi users are based in mainland China. The company's userbase is more than 100,000 families according to Mather, with 40% of active users using the service daily as lockdown keeps people inside.

"Our market is any family with a toddler and access to the internet, so about 300 million families," Mather added. "In China alone, where we currently teach kids a foundation in spoken English, we're targeting about 60 million families who are in the right middle-income brackets to be able to afford Lingumi."

Such was the early popularity of Lingumi in the region that Chinese scammers stole access to the app via an API and sold its lessons on the Chinese equivalent of eBay for a fraction of the price. Chinese users pay approximately £120 ($146) for a full course of lessons.

Lingumi says its data wasn't impacted, but the team worked with investors in China to make it harder for lessons to be sold on by scammers.

European parents are signing up to Lingumi thanks to nursery closures

The company says it is also seeing growing popularity outside its major target market as parents try to educate and entertain their kids at home.

With much of Western Europe on lockdown, parents have been accessing Lingumi in the UK to teach their children while daycare remains unavailable.

"Our mission is to bring the world's best teaching experience to pre-school children, through technology," Mather said. "For us, it goes beyond teaching English - we want children to meet their first teachers, and build foundations in key skills, on Lingumi, before they reach their first offline classrooms."

Lingumi was approached for funding at the start of the year by North Summit Capital, an Asian fund recently set up by former VP of Alibaba Cloud Wanli Min. The funding process saw Lingumi's management team spend two full days in Shenzen for due diligence after meeting Min in summer 2019. Min saw the potential for the firm in Asia, where demand for English-language tutoring is high.

The company has raised $6.6 million to-date, and other investors include LocalGlobe, Entrepreneur First, and ADV.

"We're hiring aggressively and scaling up," Mather said. "Parents are realizing the importance of their children learning English, and we believe that technology can radically improve the core teaching experience."

Lingumi says it plans to scale its offerings in the coming weeks as demand increases.

Ad space on Facebook and other sites has become cheaper in recent weeks as major advertisers consider their budgets, according to Mather, meaning the startup is going to take the opportunity to buy cheap targeted ads.

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