Gap

Many translation services offered by leading companies provide an extremely high standard of teaching in supported languages. If an English speaker wants to learn Spanish, there exists a wealth of readily available and free material, and vice versa.

However, these services cater exclusively towards already literate learners attempting to learn an additional language. They assume you can read your first language. For the 750 million adults who cannot read in any language, these solutions do not exist.

In a perfect world, we would cater to each of these people's languages individually. This would increase their quality of life by the greatest amount. However, due to their spread around the world, and part of the reason they have not already become literate being a lack of relevant teaching material in their language, this was not feasible.

The final challenge was ensuring they have the ability to access the solution. This was surprisingly the smallest one. In 2021, the number of smartphones in the world was 4 billion. In 2025, that number is estimated at 7.3 billion. While not everyone has access to a personal smartphone, the proportion is growing, and that growth alongside rapid progress in network connectivity makes mobile-first solutions increasingly viable.

So our goals were to:

• Create a teaching method that works independent of personal language
• Teach a language that will increase quality of life by the greatest amount
• Minimise hardware and network requirements

The core idea is to teach English.

• English makes up 60% of the internet
• The internet contains a large amount of information on learning new skills
• These skills can increase both economic productivity and quality of life
• New developments in artificial intelligence, such as large language models, are mainly developed in English. These have significant potential to improve the lives of people who use them for learning
• In order to interact with those models effectively, learning English is a valuable skill
• With a more interconnected world, even partial literacy in English will prove useful: giving simple directions, reading signs, understanding basic instructions
• Greater openness to learning a language is itself a useful foundation

Our aim is not to create completely fluent speakers of English. Rather, we want to give them the skills and foundation to pursue it themselves, and to stimulate efforts towards this goal in the future.

While this solution is aimed at those who are illiterate, it also generalises to people whose native languages are not extensively researched, documented, or supported with accessible resources. For example, when attempting to self-study Telugu (the fastest growing language in the US, with over 80 million speakers) it was incredibly difficult to find material in either direction.