- Fluent Forever, has raised a $4.9 million funding round led by Denver-based Stout Street Capital
- In many ways, Fluent Forever is a direct competitor to Duolingo, Babbel, and similar online language learning services
- To teach himself his first languages, the company’s founder and CEO Gabriel Wyner used the popular flashcard service Anki, wrote a book about his approach
- Wyner is not afraid to compare his approach to Duolingo’s and argues that its focus on translation exercises doesn’t translate to real language skills in the long run
- At the same time, he freely acknowledges that the Duolingo user experience and gamification are far better than Fluent Forever
- As Wyner told me, the company had trouble raising in 2019, in part because the service was seeing pretty flat growth at the time
