- Blue Canoe, a company that helps non-native English speakers improve their spoken English, announced it raised $2.5 million in funding
Blue Canoe — an artificial intelligence B2B company that helps non-native English speakers improve their spoken English — announced it has closed a seed round of funding. This brings the company’s funding to a total of $3.9 million. This funding round was led by Tsingyuan Ventures and was joined by Qualcomm Ventures, Fantail Ventures, and several others. With this round of funding, Blue Canoe is planning to scale its product and revenues with a focus on Japan and China.
Essentially, Blue Canoe sells its products to global companies that urgently need their employees to have the ability to speak English clearly.
The company’s customers include multinational corporations in the high-tech and enterprise software industries along with English language training companies in the United States, China, and Japan, including EY Japan, SAP Japan, and WE Education.
“Learning to speak English clearly is much harder than learning to read or write it, and for millions of people around the world it is a barrier to greater economic success. Blue Canoe is a game-changer, providing the most effective way to learn to speak English in a way that others can easily understand,” said Blue Canoe CEO and co-founder Sarah Daniels. “English language training companies can now expand their business and be more successful in graduating students who are fluent speakers, and multi-national corporations can help their employees be more productive team members.”
There are more than 1.5 billion people worldwide who are currently learning English as a second language with 400 million people in China alone, according to the TESOL International Association.
Even though 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. The standard teaching methods usually fail since the brain’s center for language sounds is quite resistant and even experienced English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers lack the right methodology to help. So most English language learners cannot speak clearly and confidently — whether they are students or adults — and businesses have many employees who can’t be fully productive in English.
Blue Canoe uses a patented Color Vowel System — which is a brain-based methodology for pronunciation training. This methodology 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 and build a solution that could solve the speaking gap.
Blue Canoe has an exclusive license to digitize the methodology and it has created a virtual AI teacher in its mobile app with patent-pending speech recognition and machine learning. Plus Blue Canoe customizes the vocabulary and content in the app so that it is relevant for children, students, or adults in the workforce.
“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,” added Tsingyuan Ventures partner Eric Rosenblum. “We’re excited about Blue Canoe’s team and solution, which combines AI technology, a proven methodology, and valuable data.”
Non-native speakers play on the Blue Canoe app for 10 minutes each day and receive immediate personalized feedback on their spoken English, which literally rewires their brains to allow them to learn how to correctly pronounce English.
SAP Japan VP of HR Olga Zguskaya pointed out that she is “delighted that we have offered Blue Canoe to our non-native English speaking employees. They are learning, improving their spoken English, and increasing their confidence, and all of this is a valuable benefit to our company.”
