Czech-Slovak fairy-tale storytelling app Readmio secured new funding from a Polish impact fund.
👯 Founders: Jozef Šimko, Ilya Novodvorskiy, and Radoslav Rajčan, Erik Nota
📅 Founding year: 2018
🏭 Industry: EdTech
💥 Problem: Busy parents struggle to make reading engaging and educational, while many digital story apps replace shared reading instead of strengthening parent–child interaction.
📣 Solution: Readmio is a fairy-tale app that uses voice recognition to detect when parents read aloud and enhances the experience in real time with music and sound effects, while also offering audiobooks and educational activities.
👥 Customers: Families with children, primarily parents of young kids
🌱 Stage: Growth stage
💰 Investment amount: €1M
🚀 Funded by: Simpact Ventures
💸 Previous investors: ZAKA VC, Zero One Hundred, DEPO Ventures
👁️🗨️ Investor’s perspective:
“We believe in the Readmio team’s growth vision. We understand each other well. The technology is successfully entering new markets and users rate it highly. Spending quality time with children is crucial to their development. Beyond the enormous business potential, there is real social impact consistent with the fund’s investment policy. Our investment will enable faster product development and, above all, faster scaling into new markets such as India, China, and other Asian markets,” – Krzysztof Grochowski, Partner at Simpact Ventures.
💡 It will be spent on: Global expansion into Asia (including India and China), the United States, and Latin America, as well as faster product development and scaling.
💬 In their own words:
“We have created something special – 10 million told stories to children in 135 countries – but we have the ambition to increase this number and give millions more children the gift of imagination, empathy and joy through these stories.” — Jozef Šimko, CEO
💪 Their specialty: Voice-recognition-powered interactive storytelling that turns shared reading into an immersive, educational experience.
🔑 Business model: Subscription-based model with paid family plans, complemented by partnerships (e.g. telecom operators).
👩🏫 Market: Global — currently available in 135 countries, with content in 9 languages and expansion planned worldwide.
📊 Traction:
→ 2+ million app downloads
→ 10+ million stories read or listened to
→ 300,000+ monthly active users
→ 50,000+ paying families
📈 Funding so far: €2.98M
