After a major spike in usership during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Berlin-based language learning platform Lingoda has announced that it’s recently raised $68 million (€57 million) in a growth equity investment from Summit Partners. The company, which was founded in 2013, provides users with on-demand live lessons in English, German, French, and Spanish. According to Lingoda’s leadership, the platform’s customer base increased by nearly 200% in the last year, serving customers across 200 different companies worldwide.

“We are grateful for the ongoing support of our trusted investors and partners, whose collaboration has been instrumental in our growth to date, and we are excited to embark on our new partnership with Summit,” said CEO Michael Shangkuan.  “We look forward to working together to further scale our business and accelerate our growth.”

Currently, Lingoda has a user base of around 70,000 students, and credits its recent growth to the ever-increasing adoption of educational technology that has been accelerated during the ongoing pandemic. Investors in the company say they believe the COVID-19-induced shift toward online education is irreversible. “The language learning market is increasingly shifting to online offerings that provide consumers with a more convenient, flexible, and cost-effective way to improve their foreign language skills,” said Matthias Allgaier, a managing director at Summit Partners who is soon to be joining Lingoda’s Board of Directors.

The most recent wave of funding from Summit Partners will be used to further expand Lingoda’s reach within the industry and improve the quality of its online classrooms. Lingoda, already one of the largest online language learning companies, has raised more than $83 million (€70 million) since the company’s inception in 2013. In an interview with TechCrunch, Shangkuan said that the company hopes to enhance the platform’s analytics and implement other forms of educational technology — currently, classes are taught over Zoom — to improve students’ learning outcomes.

“We are Europe’s leading online language school. We aim to be the world’s largest, offering our students and teachers more learning and teaching options than any other provider,” he said.