Seeing millions of learners around the world use Speak to build fluency and confidence has been the most rewarding part of the journey.
Crossing $100M ARR is an exciting milestone and one step toward our goal of building the world’s best superhuman AI language tutor.
What's next? We’re deepening our push in the US, expanding into new languages and growing our enterprise arm. Join us, we're hiring!
https://t.co/4tLshWo1Kc
when it comes to learning with ai, it's still 1995 and amazon is an online book store
impossible to comprehend how different humans will approach learning when superhuman tutors are abundant
.@speak is an AI language learning app that serves over 15 million users.
cto/co-founder @adhsu discusses how speak approaches agent engineering, the importance of self-healing loops, and how they use @raindrop_ai
Forbes’s AI 50 List highlights the world’s most promising privately-held AI companies, judged on commercial traction, technical talent, and how seriously they've embedded AI into what they build. @AnthropicAI, @cursor_ai, @cyera_io, @DecagonAI, @GammaApp, @WeAreLegora, @Lovable, @perplexity_ai, @speak, @SynthesiaIO, and @thinkymachines made the list. In what Forbes called a highly competitive field, this is a testament to these teams’ sharp ideas and real technical depth.
Read the full article: https://t.co/t3LqSD5j0E
Strongly agree with this K-shaped divergence happening on software teams. It's existentially urgent to move faster here than what many consider reasonable, because a decent-sized gap today will compound into an insurmountable chasm in output and execution speed and quality by the fall.
This means your team must simultaneously buy into the vision of what is possible and will be possible soon, while also being in the trenches on a daily basis wrestling with and steering agentic systems that still often make mistakes, overcomplicate things, and don't always do what the user is envisioning. Navigating this takes strong, continuous leadership that's also in the trenches.
We're doing a lot at Speak to stay on the cutting edge here as a team - a few examples:
- Continually thinking about what we're still doing manually and following that signal to agentify our repos and processes
- Retooling our engineering hiring process to explicitly test for agentic engineering skill and mindset
- Explicitly trying to build production features while keeping manual code as close to 0% as possible
If you're working at a company that isn't all-in, you should leave before it's too late. Accelerate!
I sat down with @connorzwick , founder and CEO of @speak.
We talked about what it takes to build one of the most ambitious consumer AI companies in the world and how AI is about to completely reshape how software companies are built. Today Speak does $100M ARR with over 15 million worldwide users...
This was an insanely great episode, you'll hear a lot about:
Why Connor flew to South Korea after realising the country spends ~1% of GDP learning English!
If the application layer is where the biggest AI companies will be built
How Speak built for AI YEARS before the recent boom
The danger of “magical thinking” and why most founders are focusing on the wrong things
Why smaller, faster teams will dominate in the AI era
You’re going to want to see this. Links below!
As we all know on X, agentic AI coding crossed a capability threshold at the end of 2025 such that the era of software engineers writing code by hand was over. @speak, we're urgently embracing this fundamental change to the way we develop software. I wrote up a snapshot of what we’re observing and learning, and where we think things are going:
https://t.co/T74bl2Si8x
Something shifted in December 2025. AI coding went from typing code to directing agents with natural language.
The pace is disorienting. Opinions from January are already stale. We've made this transformation our top priority.
Very-much-in-flux snapshot of what we're learning from @adhsu
https://t.co/G6ep1hXQwX
My podcast with @speak cofounder and CEO @connorzwick is live!
Highlights:
1. How Speak built an AI language learning app
2. Why users love speaking to AI language coaches
3. Growth tactics that drove Speak to a $1B valuation
Check it out on YouTube!👇
https://t.co/kdYfJWbi7d
Hear from @connorzwick with @Forbes on our origin story, winning the US market & long-term vision for the role of AI in education. PS, we're hiring! https://t.co/ABBuOdrosd