MochaTalk

I am very pleased to announce that Livemocha recently closed a $6 million in funding led by Maveron, a leading Seattle area venture capital firm. Maveron was founded by Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks and Dan Levitan in 1998 and has tremendous consumer and e-learning expertise that we hope to leverage. Maveron was also an investor in Capella University, a leader in the online education space.The irony of a Howard Schultz led venture firm investing in “Livemocha” is also not lost on us. Like Starbucks, we hope to create the premier international brand in multi-cultural language learning. The Starbucks phenomena is an extra-ordinary story and we hope to apply the many innovative strategies that Howard Schultz utilized to create an unparalleled experience for Livemocha users.

Maveron’s investment in Livemocha is, we believe, testimony to the tremendous opportunity offered by the language learning market. Based on various research reports that I have seen, this is a market that is well over $20 billion in size with over 350 million people all over the globe learning a variety of different languages. In many countries, people can double their income by learning English because they can get more attractive jobs in industry. And the need has become even stronger given increasing trends towards globalization, immigration and travel. The time is also ripe for a compelling online language solution given the widespread adoption of broadband internet access, VOIP and social networking technologies.

In the 3 months since our launch at the end of Sept 2007, we have seen a tremendous reception to the Livemocha concept. To date, we have signed up over 130,000 registered users on our site from over 200 countries all over the world. The amount of daily activity and interaction on our site has grown by leaps and bounds generating over 25 million page views a month. As a result, our Alexa rank has climbed quickly to between 5000 and 6000. In fact, in many countries, we are in the top 1000 sites. This type of interest shows that people are clearly hungry for to learn a variety of different languages and are looking for ways to build their language proficiency skills by practicing with other native language users.

There’s a lot of exciting work ahead of us to add more languages, make the site more fun and engaging and to continue to build a stronger global community. With the new funding round, we now have the ability to hire more engineering resources to further accelerate our product development plans. Stay tuned for more exciting developments over the coming months!

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