Just. Wow. The last few days have been slightly crazy. Someone lit the touch paper on our crowdfunding campaign and we literally funded overnight on Tuesday! Wednesday, we had an investor drinks evening planned which was supposed to be a mid-campaign meet-and-greet and a chance to pitch to investors. Instead, we ended up celebrating with our new crowd of supporters! It was a wonderful evening.
Our backers include the founder of Linguascope, one of the best-known and most-loved names in language education in schools in the UK. It’s a company we’ve admired for a long time and so it’s an honour that their founder, Stéphane Derône, decided to invest in Kwiziq.
I’m also very excited that Joe and Wendy White (co-founders of moonfruit) also decided to back us. We now have all three moonfruit.com founders involved who, as well as being super smart tech entrepreneurs (Wendy was 2013 Female Entrepreneur of the Year), bring fifteen years of experience to Kwiziq. Dr Eirik Pettersen, the other co-founder is already a board advisor, and I’ve worked with them before so it’s terrific to be able to do so again.
Investors with this experience are a powerful vote of confidence in Kwiziq.
The legendary Laura K. Lawless – our first Education Partner – popped by virtually to say hi by video conference, and the amazing Alexa (from Learn French with Alexa) came along physically too. (Kwiziq is soon going to be adding "smarts" to Alexa’s superb French Youtube video series.)
The fact that we’re now funded means we can significantly accelerate development of the product, improve our partner integrations, release some incredible new features and launch Spanish as our next language.
Excited? WE ARE!
Gareth
Author info
[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.