With 4 million app downloads, Estonia-based startup vocal image aims to help people improve their voice and communication skills with AI-powered coaching. But of the 160,000 active users, CEO Nick Lahoika may be the one who will most embody that mission.
Lajoika was born in Belarus and never spoke English until he moved to Estonia, and once struggled to speak his anxiety. However, he continued to “win the many pitch competitions” on behalf of a voice coaching startup inspired by his journey, he told TechCrunch.
“When I was in school, I was bullied a bit because of an obscure dictionary,” Rajoika said. As a young and unstable founder in his early 20s, he met vocal coach Maryna “Rusia” Shukiurava.
To help others, they launched a YouTube channel that eventually transformed into vocal images. This places subscription-based apps as an affordable alternative to one-to-one coaching that can be used at home. “You can make strange movements, weird sounds (…) and feel safe,” Rajoika said.
Using an interactive library of advice on tongue twisters, breathing exercises and gestures, vocal images also lean more and more AI to provide automated feedback and personalized tips.
These guided journeys revolve around work-related goals, including improving professional or leadership skills, developing public speaking and presentation skills. However, the vocal image supports not only LGBTQ people with the rights that Schkivrava supported in Belarus, but also those who want to not only increase their confidence, but simply increase their confidence.
The trio are from Belarus, but they were among the many Belarus founders who left their home country after the protests were unable to drive away President Alexander Lukashenko and encountered brutal crackdown. Rajoika chose Estonia for its business environment.
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Shortly after moving to Tallinn, vocal image was joined by local accelerator startup Wise Guys. According to Lahoika, the startup has since reached $6.5 million in annual recurring revenues (ARRs) with less than $1 million in pre-seeded funds.
More recently, the startup raised a $3.6 million seed round led by French Edtech VC company Educapital, and with participation from specialized VCs from Germany from Estonia and Generation Funds, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
As of August, the startup is currently charging $12 million in ARR and about 50,000 paid users, Lahoika said. Vocal Image, with a team of 20, including a majority of Belarusian exiles, plans to grow the development team and deploy more localizations (in addition to English, Spanish, German, French, Ukrainian and Russian).
The funding also occurred at a time when startups were selected to embrace face, meta and Scaleway as one of the five recipients of the European AI Startup Programme, and also face increasing competition. For example, Edtech Company Headway recently added an AI-powered speech trainer to its social skills app Skillsta. However, for vocal images, you can rely on AI Trove, which is uniquely GDPR-compliant.
With approximately 35,000 recordings per day, the vocal image accumulates more than 1 million substantial samples. Better yet, these recordings are labelled by the community through audio ratings. This is a collaborative feature that allows users to decide whether others think “confident” or “like a child.”
This is a kind of dataset that apps like vocal images really need to do to improve accuracy. It also helps AI startups to fine-tune their artificial voices and create even more tailwinds for startups beyond their B2C roots.
