The rules meant that more and more places became off-limits to Anne. For instance, Jews could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops. Slowly but surely, the Nazis introduced more and more laws and regulations that made the lives of Jews more difficult. Five days later, the Dutch army surrendered. Not long after, on, the Nazis also invaded the Netherlands. On 1 September 1939, when Anne was 10 years old, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and so the Second World War began. Things looked up when he started selling herbs and spices in addition to the pectin. Otto also tried to set up a company in England, but the plan fell through. Her father worked hard to get his business off the ground, but it was not easy. She learned the language, made new friends and went to a Dutch school near her home. That’s the added value that we see in the ecosystem, both for the learner as well as for the teachers and for us as a language learning company: to make sure that we can actually get you further in your learning journey because we stitch together your ecosystem for you.Before long, Anne felt right at home in the Netherlands. “So the different learning methods don’t get the benefit of knowing what Arne has just done on his app as Arne walks into a classroom.
“Users tend to stitch together their own ecosystem of learning methods, but I call that creative chaos because we never really learned how to do that - and it’s not integrated,” Schepker said. The question now is how it can bring all of those into a more cohesive platform. Add to that Babbel’s podcasts, in-app games and other touchpoints and Babbel already offers quite a rich ecosystem of language learning tools. Looking ahead, the Babbel team is specifically looking at how it can create more integrations between its different platforms, so that a teacher on Babbel Live can see what a student has learned in the app between classes, for example. Schepker noted that corporate language learning is about a third of the overall language learning market, so this represents quite a growth opportunity for the company. The plan is to soon expand it to other European markets and then the U.S., too. It took Babbel a while to build up this business, which was only available in Germany for a long time and only recently expanded to Italy. So we’re neither fully human nor fully tech and I think that’s what makes us very attractive for live tutoring classroom teachers,” he said.Īs for the company’s B2B side, Babbel signed up 5,000 new corporate learners in November and the company now works with more than 1,000 companies. “We push the frontiers of innovation and we always tried to make the best of the human intelligence and the artificial intelligence. It helps, Schepker noted, that the company is able to recruit some of the best teachers, thanks to its reputation for a high-quality product. And business overall is looking good, too, with billable sales in November surpassing $20 million, up 30% from 2020. With tens of thousands of learners, Babbel Live now hosts 15,000 classes each month and Schepker tells me that for about 25% of these learners, the live platform is the first touchpoint for these users, while 75% get started with the app.īabbel Live and the company’s B2B Babbel for Business services now account for 9% of the company’s revenue. Launched earlier this year, Babbel Live saw a 300% increase in subscriptions and a 400% increase in revenue in the second half of 2021 compared to the first half.
One of the company’s fastest-growing businesses is its live classes, which augment the service’s app-based language learning tools. Schepker is confident that the company made the right decision, something the team was able to do because Babbel is well-funded and has plenty of cash in the bank, as well as other financing options to continue to invest in its products and make acquisitions as opportunities arise. We were faced with a very conscious decision of do we launch ourselves into that market, yes or no?” “We had our books covered, we were on the right trajectory, met more than 100 super-interesting investors, got fantastic feedback - and then the Evergrande situation unraveled, which pulled the plug on most of the IPO markets. “It was disappointing for the team that worked on it - worked hard and long - and we were doing really well,” Schepker said. Scrapping the IPO was clearly unexpected for everybody, though. It has yet to announce a new date, but as Babbel CEO Arne Schepker told me, the company continues to monitor the markets. But only a few days before the initial listing the company pulled the plug with an eye on the developing Evergrande debt crisis that made the global stock markets very nervous. Berlin-based language learning service Babbel was supposed to IPO on the Frankfurt stock exchange in late September.