Memrise is a London-based language company that helps people learn a language like they would if they were in-country, through their fully-rounded ‘Learn, Immerse, Communicate’ method. The Memrise app – which is used by over 65 million registered users – offers courses across 23 languages and their combinations. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Memrise CEO Steve Toy.
Steve Toy’s Background
Toy has spent most of his professional career at tech companies in leadership roles that have frequently intersected with education, mobile apps, and AI technologies. Meanwhile, all of Toy’s community and non-profit efforts have been devoted to adult literacy, including work at the board level with ProLiteracy, Literacy Volunteers of Massachusetts, and Vision Literacy. As a result, technology and education have been at the front of his mind for quite some time.
One of the most relevant professional roles Toy held in relation to education was with Software Secure, which made both hardware and software to safeguard the integrity of computer-based exams. This is something that ChatGPT has brought back to the forefront of our collective attention.
Toy’s AI experience before Memrise was honed at EY where he started deploying techniques for real-world applications and benefits. Toy also developed mobile experience at Apalon (an IAC company) where he was responsible for a portfolio of over 50 mobile applications.
The Idea Behind Memrise
Memrise was co-founded by Ed Cooke, Greg Detre, and Ben Whately. The three friends studied Psychology and Neuroscience together at Oxford University and were all fascinated by how humans learn and how technology can make learning more effective.
After graduation, they started working on building a platform to help people use memory techniques to speed up learning. This is how the name “Memrise” came about. Over time, they focused these techniques on the task of memorizing the words in another language, leading to the product you see today.
Challenges In Building Memrise
When I asked Toy about the challenges associated with building the company, he noted that it differs at different parts of the journey: what is difficult is when you are first starting out is different from the challenges that one faces when scaling a company.
“One of the challenges specific to a language learning company, at all stages of its journey, is the strong mental models people have about what language learning should be like. For example, people tend to believe that doing grammar drills is an important part of learning a language. If you aren’t giving people grammar drills, they don’t feel like they are getting a real language learning experience,” said Toy. “The reality is that countless studies over the last 50 years have shown that a person’s ability to do a grammar test is uncorrelated with their ability to speak a language. It simply doesn’t work as a teaching method. Further to this, almost everyone actually hates doing grammar drills, and they won’t be motivated to continue learning with a method they don’t enjoy. So if language teaching focuses on grammar drills, they give up learning the language.”
Toy also noted that the irony of it all is that grammar drills being important isn’t what people really believe in their bones; it is just what they remember from school. If you asked most people about the best way to learn a language, they would say “go live in a country that speaks the language; that’s how we all learned our first language”.
Memrise has been focused on replicating that in-country experience, not teaching grammar points through phrases like “the yellow crocodile is wearing a hat” and other nonsense sentences just for the sake of drilling a particular grammatical structure, Toy added.
Core Products
What are Memrise’s core products? Toy pointed out that when someone goes “in-country” to learn a language, they are forced into a constant loop of learning the words they need, hearing them spoken in real life, and being forced to use them if they want a sandwich or a train ticket.
“We boil this experience down to three words: Learn | Immerse | Communicate,” Toy explained. “We often refer to this Learn | Immerse | Communicate pedagogy as a 3-legged stool. To effectively learn a language, you need all three legs. If you’re missing a leg, the stool falls over.”
1.) Learn is the part that is closest to other language courses: you learn words and phrases and have grammar explained. With Memrise, you don’t drill grammar, but it can be very helpful to have things pointed out. The app has an award-winning system that makes memorization super quick.
2.) Immerse is about honing the skill of understanding language when you hear it used in the wild. And you can only do that by spending time listening to language content that is just above your current level because you learn the most when you have to strain a little to understand it. The Memrise AI scours its vast library for video content that is then matched against the words and phrases that you’ve learned so that you are presented with video lessons that are appropriate for your level. Essentially, Memrise’s tech can turn any piece of video content in the world into an optimal language learning lesson.
3.) Communicate is all about confidence in speaking. The app’s Communicate tab is home to MemBot, which is the world’s first GPT-powered AI language partner. MemBot can hold conversations with you in whatever language you’re learning, on any topic under the sun. It’s like having a real language partner, who is always available, infinitely patient, and armed with convenient “translate” and “hint” functions for when you get stuck.
Best of all, MemBot is free of the human judgment that virtually all language learners think they are under when they try to speak a new language early in their learning journey. Below is a video that shows how it works:
Evolution Of Memrise’s Technology
How has Memrise’s technology evolved since launching? In the early days, Memrise focused exclusively on the “Learn” leg of the pedagogic stool. The company built one of the first and still the most effective spaced repetition tools and combined it with the use of vivid mnemonics, using flashcards.
Later Memrise started to incorporate videos into the app, creating their “Immerse” tab just at the point that mobile devices became capable of streaming high-quality videos. Memrise had first tried to build Communicate experiences in 2015, creating complex conversation trees and working with the temperamental voice input tools that were available. More recently, the company built a complex pipeline for automatically ingesting videos from any source; transcribing them, breaking them into the most useful chunks of language, and matching them against the words and phrases in their central database to generate bespoke word lists for every video. This system is what allows the company to continually create virtually limitless language practice content, which can be linked to any subject that interests the learner.
About 18 months ago, Memrise started building with generative AI tools in order to fully deliver on the Communicate experience. To do this, Memrise built a chat interface on top of GPT even before ChatGPT existed, pioneering many techniques that are now becoming widespread in prompt engineering and pushing the boundaries of what could be done with that technology.
Biggest Milestones
What have been some of Memrise’s biggest milestones? Toy cited that becoming the first European app and the only EdTech App to win Google Play’s “Best App of the Year” award in 2017 was a massive achievement. When they launched the mobile apps back in 2015, many people said that Duolingo had already won the market and there wasn’t space for new entrants. In two short years, to be recognized with that award was “just incredible” and really bore out a hypothesis that delivering a truly effective pedagogy could still differentiate an app in this market.
“The release last year of the full Immerse and Communicate experiences was the biggest pedagogic milestone. Although we’ve had aspects of these features in our product for years, that was the moment at which our product was – at last – pedagogically complete. For the founders, in particular, this was a joyful culmination of more than a decade of work,” Toy reflected.
Customer Success Story
When I asked Toy whether he could share a success story from the company, he cited a story told by company co-founder and CSO Ben Whately:
“I remember meeting a man at the world Polyglot conference in Fukuoka who had read about Memrise’s approach. He decided that he would learn Japanese so that he could travel to Japan from the US to meet his aunts and uncles who had been separated from his parents for more than 40 years. When I met him, he had just returned from meeting with all his family at a reunion, totally made possible by his learning on Memrise. It was pretty incredible. There are many such stories. It is such an extraordinary thing to be enabling these human connections. It is such an amazing way to enrich and impact people’s lives.”
Funding/Revenue
Memrise has raised about $25 million across its seed, Series A, and Series B funding rounds. The company currently generates annual revenue at the low eight-figure level.
Total Addressable Market
What is the total addressable market (TAM) size that Memrise is pursuing? Toy stated that the global language learning market was estimated to be around $49 billion in 2020 by Icef Monitor. Demand for digital learning services is further projected to reach $115 billion by 2025. This number can be filtered down in a number of ways to apply more directly to Memrise. While that is hard to do accurately, there is little doubt that any set of filters applied to this estimate leaves a TAM in the billions.
Future Company Goals
What are some of Memrise’s future company goals? “We want to change the way people think about acquiring a language. We want to stop anyone from thinking ‘I’m bad at learning languages’ by giving them the tools they need to succeed: all three legs of the language learning stool,” Toy concluded.
