Preply

Preply is a bet that language learning still needs a human on the other end of the call. While Duolingo turned study into a solo game, Preply built a two-sided market that pairs learners in 180 countries with more than 100,000 tutors teaching 90-plus languages, one live lesson at a time.

Kyiv-founded in 2012 by Kirill Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn and now run out of a Barcelona headquarters, the company crossed into unicorn territory in January 2026 when a $150M Series D landed at a $1.2B valuation. The pitch now is human-led, AI-enhanced: keep the tutor central, let AI do the scheduling, practice, and prep around them.

At its core Preply is a booking engine and video classroom wrapped around a huge supply of freelance tutors. A learner browses profiles, watches intro videos, takes a cheap or free trial lesson, then commits to recurring 1-on-1 sessions; the tutor handles the teaching while Preply handles discovery, scheduling, payments, and the classroom itself.

The catalog runs past 90 languages and well over a hundred subjects, which is the point: because tutors come from 180 countries, a learner can usually find a native speaker for something a self-study app would never cover.

Self-study apps are great at streaks and vocabulary and bad at the thing people actually want, which is talking to a person without freezing. Preply's answer is to make that person easy to find, cheap enough to try, and available across every time zone, so a learner in one country can practice with a native speaker in another at 6am or 11pm. It also solves the tutor's problem: instead of hunting for students, an independent teacher plugs into a global demand pool and lets Preply run the billing and calendar.

The bread and butter is the motivated adult: someone prepping for an exam, an interview, a move abroad, or just conversational fluency, who wants a real teacher rather than a gamified app. Reviews skew most positive with exactly that crowd.

The faster-growing edge is B2B. Preply Business sells structured language training to mid-market and enterprise employers, with content customized by role and industry, flexible monthly or enterprise contracts, and reporting that ties lessons back to performance.

Preply is really one product with three faces. The consumer marketplace is the engine; Preply Business is the same tutoring wrapped in corporate reporting and contracts; and a widening band of AI tools sits on top of both, from an AI tutoring co-pilot to adaptive practice, meant to make the human lessons stick between sessions rather than replace them.

Preply makes money by sitting in the middle of every transaction. Learners commit to an auto-renewing 28-day subscription sized by how many hours a week they want; tutors set their own rates, roughly $3 to $40-plus an hour, and Preply skims a commission off the top.

That commission is where the tension lives. A new student's trial lesson is taken at 100%, and subsequent lessons start at a steep 33% cut that only falls to 18% once a tutor has logged 400-plus hours. It rewards loyalty and punishes newcomers, which is the single loudest complaint in tutor reviews. Preply Business layers a straighter B2B contract on top for the enterprise side.

Preply's real rivals split in two. On one side sit the self-study apps like Duolingo and Babbel that win on scale and price but can't put a live human in front of you. On the other sit tutor marketplaces like iTalki, Verbling, and Cambly that play the same game Preply does. Its edge is the size of both sides of the market and a deliberate stance: keep humans central and use AI to sharpen the lessons, not to swap them out.

The traction story is the marketplace's scale: 100,000-plus tutors, 90-plus languages, and learners spread across 180 countries. On the trust side, Preply carries an 'Excellent' rating on Trustpilot, roughly 4.2 to 4.3 out of 5 across more than 14,000 reviews, which is a genuinely strong signal for a consumer marketplace of this size.

Learners consistently praise the same things: the quality of individual tutors, how easy it is to book, and how well it works for adult conversation practice and test prep. That's the durable part of the reputation.

The complaints are just as consistent. In 2026 the loudest gripe is over-reliance on AI chatbots for customer support, alongside subscription confusion, refund and lesson-expiry disputes, and slow service. Tutors add their own: the 33% starting commission and the unpaid trial lesson sting most for anyone new to the platform.

Preply hit unicorn status in January 2026 with a $150M Series D led by WestCap at a $1.2B valuation, with Goldman Sachs International as sole placement agent. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Horizon Capital joined alongside earlier backers.

The money is earmarked for AI and data work and for expanding product and engineering, which tracks with the company's public bet that AI extends human tutoring rather than undercuts it. The Ukrainian-founded framing followed the round everywhere it was covered.

Preply's next chapter is written into the Series D: pour money into AI and data while insisting the tutor stays at the center. The opportunity is a language-learning market it pegs in the tens of billions and a B2B arm that's growing faster than the consumer core. The risk is the same one its reviews already flag, that leaning on AI, especially for support, erodes the human touch that is the whole reason to pick Preply over an app.

Preply runs about 700 employees across 62-plus nationalities, with a main hub in Barcelona and offices in London, Kyiv, and New York on a hybrid model. Internally it leans on a set of principles with names like 'Care to change the world,' 'Now is the time,' and 'One Preply,' and its own 2025 survey put employee pride at 86%.

Engineering is where the culture gets specific. Teams ship 50 to 60 times a day on a Python/Django and React stack, make calls off A/B tests, and have pushed AI coding tools to 90%-plus adoption, now steering toward more autonomous, AI-augmented development.

Preply's job posts describe a full package rather than just a salary: equity, a competitive financial package, health insurance, a learning-and-development budget with dedicated time off, a monthly allowance for lessons on Preply itself, mental-health support, and Gympass-partnered wellness access in Spain. Disclosed salary bands are sparse in the data we have, so treat pay as set by role, level, and country rather than by a single published range.