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LiveMocha Receives $8 Million In Series B Funding From August Capital and Maveron
LiveMocha.com is a language learning service that has just raised $8 million in Series B funding. The funding was provided by August Capital and previous investor Maveron.
LiveMocha currently has 4.8 million registered users and offers learning courses across about 30 languages. This round of funding puts LiveMocha at about $14 million in total funding. The first round of funding was $6 million back in January 2008.
“Closing a significant round of funding is acknowledgement of our progress and underscores the large, disruptive potential of Livemocha,” stated LiveMocha CEO and co-founder Shirish Nadkarni in a press release. “We are excited and well-positioned to realize a very ambitious vision for the future of language learning.” LiveMocha is based in Bellevue, Washington.
Livemocha Brews $6 Million In Funding
Bellevue, Washington, an area near where Starbuck’s was born, comes a social network with a name that represents just where they are coming from, Livemocha. Livemocha is a social network that promotes its users the art of linguistics for the purpose of learning other languages. Its a different kind of social network, thus came the interest from Maveron Equity Partners who provided a first round of funding of $6 million. That should give the founders of Livemocha a bigger buzz than a double-shot of espresso.
The management team behind Livemocha includes Shirish Nadkarni, Krishnan Seshadrinathan, and Bryan Hurren. Shirish is the CEO and Chief Roaster, former senior exec at Microsoft that helped get MSN.com to the #3 spot from the #9 position and helped with the Microsoft acquisition of Hotmail and Inktomi Corp. Shirish studied undergrad at the University of Michigan and holds an MBA from Harvard. Livemocha officially launched at the last DEMOfall conference in San Diego. A further profile of the team members can be found at: http://www.livemocha.com/pages/team
The company blog is located at: http://blog.livemocha.com/
Some of Livemocha’s features include Audio comments (allow users to record comments in Share mode to help other users be able to pronounce words correctly), My Submissions (a place to find all learning exercises that a user has submitted), peer reviews (where teachers can grade how a user is performing), group chat sessions, MP3 Audio Podcasts, and Leaderboard improvements.
“Globalization is rapidly transforming the world around and creating a real need for foreign language proficiency,” stated As a result, language learning has emerged to become a huge worldwide market,” stated Hirish. “More than $20 billion in size.”
Classes are a trimester in size and the leaderboard shows how a users’ progress is looking. Other users enrolled in the same class are displayed in one’s profile as well.
Below is a presentation made by the Livemocha team at DEMOfall:
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