The CEO of $1.2 billion learning platform Preply says it all started with his online search for an English tutor

Kirill Bigai didn’t start Preply with a grand plan to build a unicorn. He started with a personal annoyance: trying to find a better English tutor. That search, first done through Skype, showed him something obvious in hindsight — language learners needed one place to find teachers, not a scattered internet scavenger hunt.

Bigai and cofounder Dmytro Voloshyn launched the company in 2012 in Kyiv and spent the first year living on fumes. They had pre-seed money, but it ran out fast. So they did what a lot of founders romanticize and few actually enjoy: they kept their day jobs, worked about 60 hours a week on Preply, and paid themselves nothing for a year. Bigai was at Creatio as an implementation consultant; Voloshyn was doing a PhD in machine learning and AI while also freelancing for AB InBev.

The company’s first serious traction came the hard way. In the first three weeks, Preply signed up 100 tutors through Google Forms, with Bigai cold-calling customers to join. At first it only handled English, then it widened as requests piled up. By the time the founders could draw $100 a month, then later $500 and quit their side jobs, the business was already proving it could survive on very little.

A decade later, the thing is much bigger than the startup that lived off side hustles. Preply says it connects more than 150,000 tutors with learners across 180 countries and more than 90 languages. The platform now has 800 full-time employees, hosts subjects beyond languages, and in January raised $150 million in a Series D led by WestCap. That round nearly tripled its valuation to $1.2 billion and pushed total funding past $299 million.

The latest cash is meant for AI tools and more engineering work, especially in New York and London. But the cleaner lesson is older than any valuation: the best founders often begin by fixing the thing they personally couldn’t find.