Google joins $7m round for Vietnam's Elsa

Singapore-based Monk's Hill Ventures and US accelerator SOSV, both existing investors, also participated. It brings total capital raised to date to $12 million. The fresh funding will be used to hire AI engineers and establish a Tokyo-based team to pursue expansions across Asia, including Japan, Indonesia and India.

Elsa, which stands for English language speech assistant, operates a mobile app that uses AI and speech recognition technology to help students improve pronunciation. The app listens to the way users pronounce words, sentences or conversations to pinpoint exact errors and provide real-time, feedback on pronunciation mistakes with specific suggestions on how to improve.

"Elsa provides language learning in a fun, accessible way to a quickly expanding population of users that get to see the difference in their personal and business lives," Zachary Bratun-Glennon, a partner at Gradient, said. "Communication and engagement across borders and cultures is only increasing, and we are excited to see how far this technology and team can go, particularly after their speedy development thus far."

According to a release, Elsa serves 1.5 billion people globally through technology that detects pronunciation mistakes with more than 95% accuracy. The company claims to have experienced "exponential" growth during 2018, with a 3.5x increase in paid subscriptions versus the prior year. Vietnam has been the fastest growing market with a 4x growth reported during 2018.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Consumer
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Vietnam
• Google
• Monk's Hill Ventures
• Education