Blue Canoe Announces $2.5M Seed Funding to Help English Learners Speak English Clearly and Confidently, Selling to Global Companies & English Language Training Programs
Summary
While many language programs help learners memorize vocabulary and grammar rules to become proficient in reading and writing English, learning after childhood to speak fluently is a challenging “last mile” problem. It has been used by tens of thousands of ESL teachers, as well as top institutions including the U.S. Department of State, the Peace Corps, Yale, Harvard and Georgetown universities, to teach millions of learners. Daniels and her team founded Blue Canoe in 2016 as a part of the Kernel Labs incubator after realizing that they could scale the Color Vowel System with technology, and build a revolutionary solution that could solve the speaking gap. Blue Canoe has an exclusive license to digitize the methodology and has created a virtual AI teacher in its mobile app with patent-pending speech recognition and machine learning. “Blue Canoe is addressing a critical gap in the $40 billion global market for English language training, and their AI solution is unique and effective,” said Eric Rosenblum, Partner with Tsingyuan Ventures in Los Altos, Calif. “We’re excited about Blue Canoe’s team and solution, which combines AI technology, a proven methodology, and valuable data.” Olga Zguskaya, VP HR, SAP Japan, added that she is “delighted that we have offered Blue Canoe to our non-native English speaking employees.