Blog 28: BoldVoice

Improving pronunciation and confidence for non-native English speakers

Company: BoldVoice is a mobile application for non-native English speakers. The app helps to improve English language pronunciation and confidence, via personalized content from Hollywood accent coaches and instant feedback from speech artificial intelligence, enabling foreign-born professionals and students in the US to improve their English accents and advance their careers.

HQ Location & Year Founded: New York, 2020

Founder: Anada Lakra is a native of Albania, who came to the US to study at Yale and has since blazed a trail as a management consultant at McKinsey and as a product manager at several leading technology companies, including Peloton. Anada also received her MBA from Harvard Business School.

Funds Raised and VC Investors: $3 million from Flybridge Capital, Liquid2 Ventures, XFund, Y Combinator, and strategic angel investors.

❖ Where did the idea for BoldVoice originate?

The idea of BoldVoice is based on my own lived experience as an immigrant. When I moved to the US for college, I experienced the pain of having studied English for years, but then suddenly struggling to speak conversationally among native speakers. I was often asked to repeat myself. Not being able to be properly understood is a nearly universal problem for immigrants. My co-founder Ilya Usorov, whose parents immigrated from Russia, aced these challenges at work and felt the impact of their foreign accent on their career advancement. When I was attending HBS, I again saw international students struggle to speak up in class and feel confident during job interviews, even though they spoke English fluently “on paper.” All these experiences inspired me to do something about this unaddressed problem that so many experience.

❖ What is the key problem that BoldVoice intends to solve? 

Studies have shown that an accent can make job candidates 16% less likely to be hired and entrepreneurs are 23% less likely to be able to raise money for their business. We want to help immigrants and non-native speakers always be understood and confident in English, so they can overcome these barriers.

The inspiration for this business was a friend who was able to gain confidence in speaking by hiring a professional accent coach. I didn’t even know it was possible to get coaching for speech – the problem is it costs $200 an hour for one session. That is when I had a “lightbulb moment.” Through technology, I knew that this solution could be automated to serve the vast market of those who simply couldn’t afford $200 per hour lessons. 

❖ How are you most differentiated as a service?

Our vision was to build an experience that is as effective as working 1:1 with a speech and accent coach, yet affordable and accessible. We needed a scalable technology product to do this. We started by working with Hollywood accent coaches and produced video lessons for people of different linguistic backgrounds. This allowed us to offer “personalization at scale”, by serving our users with only relevant content based on their challenges from their mother tongue. Our speech AI layer provides instant feedback and mimics what coaches would give as 1:1 feedback in a private session. The speech AI is precise enough to catch small differences in pronunciation. The combination of our coaching and video content are highly effective to help our users feel improvement in every session on the app.

❖ What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?

Today we serve hundreds of thousands of users who speak over 90 native languages across all different linguistic backgrounds. We offer hundreds of video lessons from six Hollywood accent coaches, and a myriad of practice materials.  Our user base has been growing multi-fold in just the past six months, with users all around the world

❖ What lies ahead in the plans for BoldVoice?

We have found a lot of user love and we are going to continue building our product to serve more people. We will also be pursuing additional growth channels to help us get in front of more people. We are currently focused on attracting immigrants in the US. However, we also plan on global expansion, especially targeting those who work for multinational or American companies globally. The long-term vision is to help every non-native English speaker access better professional opportunities through clear and confident communication in the language of business.

Ron’s Take

Immigrants to the US are an incredibly powerful and well-documented source of social, economic and cultural capital and diversity. Since this country’s inception, this has always been the case and it makes us who are. Yet immigrants too often face barriers and burdens that most of us do not even stop to consider. As featured in a previous blog post, Boundless is helping immigrants manage the cost and complexity of entering and settling in the US. BoldVoice is tackling one of the other most important gaps, which is the ability for newcomers to integrate into educational, professional and social settings in the country by being able to communicate and be understood more clearly.