Startup Spotlight Q&A: Lingvist
By: The Startup Grind Team
Tags: Startup Spotlight, Technology, Language Learning, Lingvist, Startup

Matt Müntel is an entrepreneur with a background in particle physics. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 2008 from the University of Tartu. Müntel joined the CMS experiment at CERN while a Ph.D. student and was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2013.

He then had the idea to use the same algorithms from particle physics to accelerate human learning 10x. Interestingly enough, upon meeting the technical co-founder of Skype, Jaan Tallinn, he realized that they had the same goal. Both had chosen language learning as the first example to experiment with the learning algorithms. This led to the creation of a company called Lingvist.

In a sentence, what does your company do?

Lingvist makes learning 10x faster and more effective, through science and advanced technology.

Describe how and when your company came to be. In other words, what was the problem you found and the ‘aha’ moment?

After we had discovered the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012, I felt ashamed that I had not learned French, even though CERN is situated in a French-speaking area near Geneva in Switzerland.

I asked myself if I could use the same algorithms that we were using to discover unknown particles with the Large Hadron Collider (probably the most complicated machine built by humans) to speed up my learning.

I didn’t know anything about languages, particularly French, but I knew how to do scientific data analysis and to program. I wanted to know how much time it would take to learn a language if one would do everything most optimally.

I used CERN supercomputers to analyze how the French language is used. The best proxy was movie subtitles because they consist mostly of one-to-one speech. This is very close to what people speak in their real lives. I analyzed all the movies ever produced and got a very good statistical overview of what I should learn. My calculations showed that I should be able to learn 95% of the most frequently used words and sentences in just 200 hours if I optimized my memory perfectly.

This was the “Aha” moment — if this were true, then it could be possible to decrease the time to learn a language from many years to a few months!!! And almost every single person would benefit from it because TIME is the most valuable resource of nature.

Having built the prototype and learned with it for 2 months, I passed the national examination of French with the average score that students get after learning for 12 years. This result made me think that I should make this software available to anyone who wanted to learn faster and better.

What makes your company/product different in this market?

Lingvist’s main differentiation from other methods of learning resides in its game-changing technology and vast amounts of analyzed learning data, which increase learning speed and enhance memorization. Technology is transferable to almost any field of education. Through advanced measuring, Linguist estimates learning speeds of up to 10x compared to traditional methods.

What users are particularly excited about is that they can create hyper-personalized courses for themselves. It takes a few seconds to create a course about any field they need a language for — to study medicine, work in a financial institution, cook at home, or dream about traveling — unlimited options. Users can define the domain by a few keywords or copy text from a book or even take a picture. The Lingvist course creation tools make a comprehensive language analysis and find the most impactful things they should learn and then teach them most efficiently.

And customers are amazed by their progress, saying: “It’s just uncanny how quickly I can learn.”

What milestone are you most proud of so far?

For me, the most exciting milestone is that we’ve collected vast amounts of human learning data and have been able to understand how to speed up human learning with AI.

We’re building such precise memory models for each user by constantly analyzing their learning process. This is the secret source of accelerated learning. No other company has managed to do it.

Coming from nuclear physics, I get very excited about discovering how nature truly works, based on experiments and precise measurements, which is the same method that has given us the biggest breakthroughs in any field of science. We’re making this breakthrough in education.

Have you pursued funding and if so, what steps did you take?

Yeah, we’ve raised quite a bit of money, as it’s a complicated technology to build.

We have raised €13M from Jaan Tallinn (the technical co-founder of Skype), Rakuten (a Japanese e-commerce giant), and several Nordic investors.

What KPIs are you tracking that you think will lead to revenue generation/growth?

We track how much people are truly learning! This is the most important KPI for us. Learning is hard to measure because people forget things. And if they have forgotten what they learned, the learning has not added any value. However, we can predict how people will remember every single item that they will learn in the next minute, hour, day, week, month, year, or decade. This gives us an incredibly precise picture of how much we are teaching. And our goal is to teach more than any other platform.

We’ve found that learning efficiency is the most important lead metric for conversion and retention — which means that learning efficiency is very directly related to revenue generation. This is super good news for investors because it aligns the user interests with investor interests, and we as a company can truly dedicate our efforts to improving learning.

What advice would you give to other founders?

My best advice is to never give advice. It sounds contradictory, but there is a logic behind it.

If we go to a doctor who knows a million times more about medicine than we do, then we can take the advice.

Nevertheless, in most cases, especially in building a startup, it never happens that somebody knows a million times more about your situation than you do yourself. Most likely, whoever tries to give advice doesn’t know everything that you know. However, they know about their experiences and draw their advice from their earlier conditions that may or may not apply to you. This may lead to implementing the wrong advice. Funnily enough, the more respect and trust you have towards the advice-giver the more vulnerable you are to not noticing the mismatching base assumptions that may make the advice wrong.

A very good mechanism to protect against this is to talk about experiences and learnings and avoid giving advice. This allows you to process the other experiences and put them into your context and make decisions yourself. The probability that it leads to better decisions is much higher.