Language Learning Startup Babbel.com Raises Undisclosed Amount of Funding

As someone who constantly faces the necessity of learning and improving one's English, I have a fascination with tools that help people learn new languages online. And today one of such tools, the Germany-based Babbel.com raised "significant VC funding" by Kizoo and VC Fonds Berlin and also announced a new feature to improve the users' leaning experience.

I actually have a problem with this announcement - I don't understand why companies choose to announce the new funding round and fail to report the amount. Who actually determines what is considered to be "significant"? Say, if you have 10 full-time developers in the Silicon Valley and a huge marketing/advertising campaign planned, the amount should be much higher than if you build the product in India or here in Russia with a small team of talented engineers and rely on the word of mouth marketing mainly - but in both cases it may be considered significant both by the VCs behind the round of funding and by the recipient of funds. I have no idea why the amount has not been disclosed in this particular case but I suspect that they chose not to mention it publicly because it could be considered not all that "significant" in the Silicon Valley as the investment in internet projects here in Europe are still measured on another scale.

The company is only one year old and the product has only been online for half a year now - with everything self-supported by the four founders. Hopefully for the young startup this round will mean further development and growth.

In addition to announcing the undisclosed amount of funding (sure, it would have made too short of a press release), the company also announces a new feature today - interactive tutorials that are currently in private beta testing. The tutorials are designed to add to social building of multimedia vocabularies in 5 languages that are currently supported by the site - English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. In the future the company also promises to roll out a number of more advanced tools for language educators to build tutorials of their own and use them at work (do I see monetization model here?).

And now that the first round of funding has been raised, I believe we will see Babbel.com turning more into a comprehensive language learning destination for everyone. I also wish they will be able to add support for further languages now that they have money to hire language professionals for some initial materials. We'll see how the site lives up to our expectations and I hope "significant" means enough to build something useful to the vast majority of people learning new languages.