The fashionable move in education right now is to replace the teacher with a chatbot. Preply, the language-learning marketplace founded by Ukrainians and headquartered in Barcelona, just raised a $150 million Series D at a $1.2 billion valuation on the contrarian bet, keep the human tutor, and use AI to make them more effective rather than redundant.
The round was led by WestCap with Índico Capital Partners, bringing total funding to roughly $299 million. What makes it more than a vanity valuation is the financial turn underneath it: over the past year Preply became EBITDA-positive, which in the current climate is worth more than any unicorn label. The platform connects more than 100,000 tutors with learners across 180 countries in over 90 languages, with an AI “co-pilot” layer supporting the human instruction rather than replacing it.
Preply’s own research says 96% of learners consider a human tutor essential to their progress. That’s either a deep truth about how people learn, or the most convenient survey result a human-tutoring marketplace has ever commissioned. Possibly both.
The strategic clarity is the appealing part. As CEO Kirill Bigai puts it, the company is innovating “at the intersection of human tutoring and AI”, not at the expense of one or the other. In a category stampeding toward automation, choosing to defend the human element is a genuine point of view, and the EBITDA line suggests it’s also a profitable one.
The Barcelona base matters to the story too. Preply has become an anchor of the city’s 22@ innovation district, and its founders’ decision to build a global company from Southern Europe, rather than from the Bay Area, is precisely the kind of “stayed and won” arc this publication exists to document. A Ukrainian-founded, Barcelona-headquartered unicorn that’s profitable and growing is not a footnote in the European tech story.