Preply just crossed the line that quietly separates fast-growing startups from category-defining companies, closing a $150 million Series D round that values the global language learning marketplace at $1.2 billion. The round was led by WestCap, a firm known for scaling marketplaces like Airbnb and StubHub, with Goldman Sachs International acting as sole placement agent, and it lands at a moment when language learning is no longer a hobby but an economic necessity. Roughly one in four people worldwide is actively trying to learn a second language, and that number keeps rising as work, travel, migration, and remote collaboration blur borders faster than institutions can keep up.
What makes Preply interesting is not just the size of the round but the timing and the direction it signals. While many education platforms are racing toward full automation, Preply is doubling down on a hybrid model that treats human tutors as the core product, not a temporary bridge to AI. More than 100,000 tutors now teach over 90 languages to learners in 180 countries, and the company has tripled its bookable tutors since its Series C while adding over 40 new languages. That scale alone is hard to replicate, but the real shift is happening under the surface, where AI is being used not to replace teachers, but to amplify them. Their tutoring co-pilot tracks progress, generates insights, handles admin, and leaves tutors with more time to actually teach, which sounds obvious, but in edtech it’s almost radical.
The financials quietly tell the same story of maturity. Over the past year Preply improved EBITDA and reached EBITDA-positive territory, a milestone that tends to separate durable platforms from growth-at-all-costs experiments. At the same time, the broader market is expanding fast enough to justify long-term ambition. According to HolonIQ, the direct-to-consumer language learning market is projected to reach $227 billion by 2035, after already tripling in size over the last five years. Preply is positioning itself not as an app you try for a few weeks, but as infrastructure for how people actually learn to communicate in a globalized world.
The company’s own data reinforces why this approach is working. In a 2025 efficiency study conducted with LeanLab Education, 96% of learners said real conversations with a human tutor were essential to their progress, and 97% linked those interactions to higher confidence. Even more striking, learners progressed up to three times faster than average benchmarks, with one in three moving up a full CEFR level in just 12 weeks. That’s not a marketing slogan, it’s an argument: human guidance still matters, but it scales better when paired with the right technology.
With new capital and backing from investors including EBRD and Horizon Capital, Preply plans to deepen its AI and data capabilities, expand engineering and product teams, and accelerate global growth. WestCap’s involvement is a signal that this is being treated as a long-term marketplace play, not just an education product, and the addition of Allen Mask to the board brings operational experience from companies that know how to scale trust-based platforms across continents. Preply’s total funding now stands at around $299 million, but more importantly, its direction is clear. Instead of automating learning away from people, it is building a system where technology makes human connection more effective, more accessible, and more measurable. That may end up being the difference between teaching languages and actually changing how people move through the world.