Preply has raised a $150 million Series D round led by WestCap, pushing the company's valuation to $1.2 billion and officially making it a unicorn. The milestone is the latest validation of a belief founder Kirill Bigai has held since his own struggle learning English that no amount of software substitutes for a real conversation with another human being.

Preply began in 2012 out of a specific frustration. After moving from Ukraine to the United States, Bigai realized that years of formal English study hadn't actually prepared him for everyday conversation. He could follow much of what people said, but speaking back confidently and naturally was an entirely different skill one that rigid, exam-focused learning methods had never built.

Together with Dmytro Voloshyn and Serge Lukyanov, Bigai set out to build something more direct: a marketplace connecting learners with real tutors for flexible, personalized lessons centered on speaking rather than studying in the abstract.

More than a decade later, that founding insight has scaled into a genuinely global operation. Preply now connects students with more than 100,000 tutors teaching upward of 90 languages to learners in roughly 180 countries, supported by a team of more than 750 people across international hubs.

What's notable about Preply's growth is how consistent the underlying thesis has remained through more than a decade of shifting technology and market expectations — a kind of founder resilience that's easy to overlook in an era preoccupied with overnight success stories. While many language apps have leaned fully into self-guided, automated lessons, Preply has kept live, one-on-one instruction at the center of its product, describing its approach as human-led, AI-enabled. The tutors remain the core experience; AI works quietly in the background to make lessons feel more personalized and continuous over time, rather than starting from scratch every session.

WestCap's decision to lead the Series D reflects a broader shift in investor confidence toward platforms that combine human expertise with AI rather than betting everything on automation alone. With the new funding, Preply plans to keep refining how it matches students with tutors and supports learners over the long arc of actually becoming fluent.

The scale has changed dramatically since 2012. The mission, the company insists, hasn't.