Although the COVID period was fruitful for a lot of EdTech startups, the story of Preply is not just a tale of a startup “striking it rich” during the pandemic. Preply started building its foundations much earlier. In hindsight, it is evident their success is a proof of decade-long exercise in patience, extreme grit, and a counter-intuitive bet on human connection in an increasingly automated world.
In January 2026, Preply officially achieved unicorn status with a $1.2 billion valuation following a $150 million Series D. The round led by WestCap, a firm known for scaling major marketplaces like Airbnb. Allen Mask, a partner at WestCap and former Airbnb executive, is also joining Preply’s board, alongside other news.
For regional founders and growth marketers, Preply’s path offers a blueprint for building a category leader when the “easy money” era has ended (at least for EdTech), and you face world-class competitors.
The pivot: From local to the world
The most important moment in Preply’s history happened already in 2013. The founders (Kirill Bigai, Sergey Lukyanov, and Dmytro Voloshyn) originally launched FindGuru, a marketplace for local, in-person classes in Ukraine.
They quickly realized that a local directory is a “small” business. When they pivoted to an online-only model and renamed the company Preply, they unlocked infinite supply. Suddenly, a student in Kyiv could learn from a native speaker in New York.
Takeaway: Don’t fall in love with your first solution; fall in love with the problem. The problem wasn’t “I need a tutor nearby”; it was “I need a native speaker I can trust.”
The product thesis: “Anti-Duolingo”
While the rest of the EdTech world was obsessed with “gamification” and replacing teachers with AI bots to lower costs, Preply did the opposite. They bet that human-to-human connection is a premium feature, not a bug.
They branded their approach as “Human-led, AI-enhanced” and it wasn’t just a marketing slogan. This manifesto was also evident in their technical roadmap.
Instead of using AI to teach the student, they used AI to handle the “boring” parts of teaching: generating lesson summaries, creating personalized homework, and tracking grammar mistakes. This allowed them to position themselves as the “high-efficacy” choice. While Duolingo is for casual practice, Preply is for people who actually need to speak the language for their careers.
Coinciding with the Series D announcement, Preply also released results from their 2025 Efficiency Study, which was a brilliant move, building a ditch against the flood of cheap, pure-AI language apps.
Other key product milestones
Preply’s 14-year journey is actually longer than most people realize. Their “overnight success” as a unicorn was built on several key decisions:
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- They spent years testing the model in smaller markets like Poland and Brazil before pouring millions into the US.
- In 2023, while they maintained their engineering heart in Kyiv, Preply officially moved its global headquarters to New York. They appointed C-suite leaders from Airbnb and Google to focus on the US corporate market.
- In 2019, Preply made a high-risk technical bet to move all lessons away from Skype and into their proprietary Preply Classroom. This allowed them to collect data on how people learn, which eventually powered their AI.
- They didn’t pause growth during the 2022 invasion; they built a “Wartime Operating System” that ensured 100% uptime for their global users.
- They didn’t chase the AI hype in 2023. They spent that year building an “Assistant” (the Copilot) that actually helped their tutors earn more money, rather than trying to replace them.
Becoming the investor’s dream
Investors like WestCap were drawn to Preply not just because of its consumer growth, but because of its B2B pivot. Post-COVID, individual consumer spending became volatile. Preply neutralized this risk by launching Preply Business. They signed global giants like Unilever and Datadog, moving from “one-off” consumer payments to high-retention, recurring corporate contracts.
Maybe the biggest news from Preply recently was that by 2025, they were EBITDA positive, a rare feat for an EdTech unicorn in a high-interest-rate environment. This proved to WestCap that Preply didn’t need the Series D to survive, but rather to accelerate.
Last but not least, you cannot tell the Preply story without mentioning its Ukrainian roots. Since the war started, the company has maintained a large engineering hub in Kyiv.
Managing a global scale-up is hard; doing it while your team is working from bomb shelters with Starlink and generators is a different level of discipline. This signaled to the market that Preply’s leadership could handle any crisis, and made the company’s growth look stable compared to more fragile Silicon Valley peers.
The moral of the story? Preply’s path to unicorn status proves that in a world of “cheap” AI content, curated human expertise becomes more valuable, not less. By using technology to make humans better at their jobs rather than replacing them, they built a business model that is both defensible and highly profitable.
