Preply has joined the unicorn ranks with a $1.2 billion valuation after securing a $150 million Series D, a milestone that underscores not just the company’s growth but the endurance of Ukraine’s tech sector. The language learning marketplace, founded by Ukrainian entrepreneurs and now operating across multiple hubs, has also been EBITDA profitable for the past twelve months—an inflection point driven by product focus and a rapid infusion of AI.
AI and a Marketplace Flywheel Drive Growth
Preply’s core marketplace connects learners with a global base of roughly 100,000 tutors, but its recent acceleration has hinged on AI tooling layered into every step of the learning journey. The company applies machine learning to summarize lessons, generate tailored homework, and—critically—match students with tutors who fit their goals and schedules. These features help tutors scale their prep time while giving learners a more personalized path, a combination that improves retention and unit economics.
To expand these capabilities, Preply is hiring AI talent across its four offices in Barcelona, London, New York, and Kyiv. The buildout mirrors a broader edtech shift identified by analysts at HolonIQ and GSV: marketplaces that pair human tutors with AI copilots are growing faster than single-modal apps because they blend accountability with adaptive content.
Kyiv Operations Persevere Under Constant Wartime Pressure
Preply’s Kyiv office has remained active throughout the war, a choice that gives the company an unusually close connection to its roots. Of its approximately 750 employees, around 150 work from Kyiv, where air raids and rolling outages routinely disrupt daily life. To ensure continuity and safety, the company keeps a generator-powered office open 24/7 with heat, internet, and backup electricity—an operational discipline more often associated with disaster recovery than a scaling startup.
This lived reality has shaped Preply’s culture in tangible ways. Teams accustomed to contingency plans and rapid handoffs have built a bias for action. Management calls it resilience; operationally, it looks like faster decision cycles, hardened infrastructure, and a sharper focus on outcomes that matter to learners and tutors. In wartime, reliability becomes a competitive advantage.
Backers and Signals of a Possible Future Public Path
The round was led by WestCap, the growth equity firm founded by former Airbnb CFO Laurence Tosi, whose track record includes guiding companies through late-stage scaling and public readiness. Existing investors such as Horizon Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Owl Ventures, and Techstars alumni networks remain part of the story, signaling confidence in both the economics of the marketplace and its category leadership in live language learning.
Preply has not set a timeline for an IPO, but the investor mix points to pragmatic optionality: keep compounding profitable growth while building the governance and metrics rigor that public investors expect. For a platform that spans consumer demand and professional tutoring supply, the immediate priorities are likely to be AI augmentation, geographic depth, and enterprise use cases where companies subsidize employee upskilling.
A Marker for Ukraine’s Tech Ecosystem Amid Wartime
Preply’s unicorn status adds to a roster of Ukrainian-rooted successes that includes Grammarly and a strong pipeline of venture-backed startups supported by regional investors like Horizon Capital. Despite the war, Ukraine’s engineering talent remains globally competitive, with distributed operating models and security-first infrastructure becoming the norm across teams.
For the edtech sector, the signal is equally clear: the future of language learning is human-plus-AI, not AI alone. Preply’s profitability, continued investment in Kyiv, and disciplined expansion show how a marketplace can scale responsibly under extraordinary pressure. At $1.2 billion, the company’s valuation captures market traction—but its persistence in Ukraine captures something harder to price: a culture forged by adversity that keeps shipping, teaching, and growing.
