Our fund has made a small investment in Conversifi.
Conversifi developed a multi-sided platform that connects language learners with native speakers for on-demand conversations over video chat. We first investigated the company in February of this year. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we suspended the due diligence in late March. Then back in September, we restarted the due diligence work. What we found was that during the pandemic, the company has thrived in business developments. It has teamed up with many universities’ language departments around the world to build Conversifi into their curricular. Each student is automatically signed up at the beginning of the semester to use Conversifi for specified numbers of hours and the payments are counted as part of course fees. In addition, Conversifi has also signed contracts piloting with two major textbook publishers to integrate Conversifi platform with the textbooks. When students purchase a textbook, it includes certain hours of Conversifi usages. All of these have greatly accelerated the growth of the business.
We expect Conversifi will continue offering more languages and enrolling more universities to its program.