Estonia-based startup Vocal Image blends speech coaching with artificial intelligence to help users sharpen their voice, presence, and presentation skills through a mobile app used by millions globally.
The company reports several million installs and a core active base in the hundreds of thousands, with a paid subscriber cohort that the team says has grown into the tens of thousands.
AI coaching and practical features
Vocal Image offers interactive exercises including breathing work, articulation drills, tongue twisters and gesture guidance. Those modules are designed to simulate the kind of feedback people typically get in one-on-one vocal coaching.
More recently the app has leaned into automated critique: machine learning models analyze short recordings and give users tailored tips on clarity, pace, and perceived confidence, freeing users from the time and cost barriers of private lessons.
The platform targets workplace communication needs—presentation skills, leadership presence and public speaking preparedness—but also serves people improving everyday confidence or refining voice alignment as part of gender transition work.
Data, privacy and community labeling
A core asset for Vocal Image is its growing voice dataset. The startup says it collects tens of thousands of voice samples each day and has accumulated more than a million real-voice clips, many annotated by the app community.
Community-driven features let users rate peers on attributes such as “confident” or “childlike,” producing labeled examples that improve model calibration and create training material for more accurate automated feedback.
Vocal Image emphasizes GDPR compliance for its European user base and frames privacy protections as central to product trust, especially as the startup explores ways to license or apply its anonymized dataset for voice model fine-tuning.
Growth, funding and competitive landscape
After joining the Startup Wise Guys accelerator in Tallinn, Vocal Image scaled quickly on modest early investment. The founders say the business reached multi‑million annual recurring revenue within a few years while remaining capital efficient.
The company was recently named among winners in a European AI startup program run by Hugging Face in partnership with industry firms, raising its profile as investors and large platforms seek reliable, privacy‑driven speech datasets.
Competition is intensifying: edtech players such as Headway have added speech trainers to social skills products, and other language or coaching apps are introducing AI feedback loops. Vocal Image positions its community-labeled dataset and coaching pedagogy as differentiators.
Origins, team and future plans
The startup was founded by CEO Nick Lahoika together with vocal coach Maryna “Rusia” Shukiurava and CTO Mikalai Karaliou. The founders originally worked together on voice tutorials and YouTube content before formalizing the product into a subscription app.
Several members of the team are Belarusian expatriates who relocated amid political unrest in their home country and established the company in Tallinn to take advantage of Estonia’s startup infrastructure and digital‑friendly regulations.
Looking ahead, Vocal Image plans to expand engineering capacity, roll out more language localizations beyond English, Spanish, German, French, Ukrainian and Russian, and explore B2B and voice‑model licensing opportunities while maintaining privacy safeguards.
For communicators, trainers and organizations seeking scalable, data‑informed voice coaching, Vocal Image aims to combine human pedagogy with machine learning to make confident speaking more accessible.
