Across the world, millions of parents are eager to have their children learn English — a skill increasingly seen as essential for accessing global academic and career opportunities. This, however, is complicated by an overwhelming shortage of teachers.
According to UNESCO, 44 million additional teachers will be needed globally by 2030. In Latin America in particular, 3 million teachers will be required. With fewer teachers comes over-crowded classrooms, making subjects that require one-on-one attention, like language learning, even harder.
As a result, English proficiency remains a challenge in the region, with economic barriers significantly limiting access to extra-curricular teaching. Smaller-group or even private tutoring, for example, remains unaffordable for the vast majority of parents.
What’s more, there are significant disparities in the success of English education across Latin America with countries like Mexico sporting nearly 20% higher proficiency rates than Brazil.
Enter Ivan Crewkov, the founder on a mission to democratize English education in Latin America.
By identifying a critical gap in the edtech landscape — the lack of accessible, effective AI tools for children — Crewkov developed Buddy.ai, the world’s first voice-based AI tutor designed specifically for kids.
With its animated characters, real-time conversation capabilities, and speech recognition technology, Buddy.ai simulates a one-on-one classroom experience in the palm of a child’s hand.
The app combines multimodal avatar-based AI tutoring, facilitating play-based learning that it says keeps children engaged and enhances their learning.
Its child-friendly speech recognition technology was created from the ground up with over 25,000 hours of children’s speech and is equipped to recognize a range of accents, variations in speech patterns, different volumes, and background noises.
As a result, the app successfully outperforms Google and Apple’s native automatic speech recognition systems when used by children.
And unlike other off-the-shelf speech recognition technologies, it is compliant with the US Federal Trade Commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
On Tuesday, Crewkov was in Brazil where he delivered a presentation at Web Summit Rio on how he developed this solution to Latin America’s biggest education problem with his own daughter in mind, ensuring the safety of the app for its users.
The necessity of Buddy.ai was made evident as countries in Latin America swiftly responded to its release. In the first quarter of 2024, Brazil recorded the highest number of new Buddy.ai users, totaling one million registrations and representing 18% of new registrations, according to data shared with Latin America Reports by the company. This comes as no surprise as Brazil records the lowest level of English proficiency in the region at 30% as of 2024.
Perhaps one of the most inspiring outcomes of the app is the way in which it has been used to help migrant children learn English in the US.
According to the company, these pupils find themselves in a uniquely challenging situation, having to adapt to unfamiliar academic, social, and linguistic environments all at once.
Buddy.ai offers a personalized language learning experience to guide pupils through their integration into new communities during an undoubtedly complex transition.
Under Crewkov’s leadership, Buddy.ai has garnered over 50 million downloads since launching in 2017.
It closed an $11 million seed investment round at the end of 2024 led by BITKRAFT Ventures and EduCapital, with several investors casting their vote of confidence in Crewkov’s innovative solution, including One Way Ventures, J Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and Goodwater Capital among others.
Today, the app reaches over 20 million students worldwide annually, 9 million of which are living in Latin America.
Through his conversational language learning app, Crewkov has set his sights on pioneering education in Latin America, helping one student at a time to connect with an increasingly globalized world.
Featured image credit: Buddy.ai
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
