Eevi raises pre-seed funding to get language learners speaking from day one

Eevi, the Amsterdam-based language tutor built around spoken conversation, has raised a pre-seed round led by Rockstart. The company is trying to replace the usual tap-and-swipe routine with real-time AI that talks back, listens, and adapts as you go. That’s the bet, anyway: less recognition, more actual speaking.

The founders came to the idea from personal frustration. Filemon Schöffer, Eevi’s CEO, had already built and sold Hubs.com, later worked at OpenUp, and then ran into the limits of existing language apps while learning Japanese after that exit. His co-founder, Jago Gazendam, a childhood friend with a background in education and healthtech, had a similar complaint while learning Spanish in Spain. They started working on Eevi in the summer of 2025 and launched a closed beta in January.

That beta changed the product. Eevi ran six months of testing with around a hundred advanced learners, and the team decided a standard transcript-heavy chat screen was getting in the way. Now the app uses a voice-first interface that starts with a blank canvas and only drops in multimedia when it helps, like an audio player for listening practice. Schöffer says figuring out what a voice-first language-learning interface should feel like was one of the biggest lessons from the beta.

The curriculum is built to look more like a private tutor than a generic chatbot. Eevi says it draws on more than 15 academic frameworks and covers more than 150 topics and situations, from family life to grocery shopping and dining out. It uses Gemini as its voice model across around 14 languages, and the company says roughly 500 words mastered in context can cover about 80 per cent of daily conversation. The system also keeps an individual memory for each user and can adjust lessons if someone is moving too fast or too slowly.

For now, Eevi is aiming at international professionals and migrants who want something beyond a mass-market app but cheaper and more flexible than a traditional language school. Pricing starts at €49 for six months, or €18 a month, and the company says the six-month package is roughly the cost of one hour with a human tutor, depending on the tutor. The funding will go toward launch and growth over the next 12 months, while Eevi also starts exploring corporate sales.

The longer play is bigger than language learning alone. Schöffer wants Eevi to prove that AI can deliver a genuinely different kind of education product, not just a slicker wrapper on the old one. And he’s also blunt about the dependency problem: the company would rather not stay tied forever to the big model providers.