SpeakX.ai says it has over two million monthly learners, more than two lakh paying subscribers and positive operating margins, according to founder Arpit Mittal in an India Today interview. The app has over 1 crore downloads on Google Play, and roughly 60 percent of users, the company says, come from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
"Most EdTech platforms use AI as a feature layer," Mittal says. "At SpeakX, we built the product around AI from Day one. The AI is not supporting a teacher in the background. It acts as the teacher, the practice partner, and the feedback engine in one system."
The gap SpeakX is betting on is the one between knowing English and speaking it confidently. A 40-minute period, dozens of students and one teacher cannot build fluency, which grows through repetition and correction. "AI solves the practice gap by giving each learner unlimited one on one speaking time outside class hours," Mittal says.
In the app there are no passive videos or long grammar explanations. Learners enter a live conversation in practical situations such as a job interview, a workplace discussion, a customer call or a daily social interaction. "Pronunciation and usage are corrected while the learner is speaking, not as a delayed report," he says. These are simulated conversations that adjust as the learner responds.
On the speech technology, Mittal says: "At SpeakX, our speech recognition accuracy for Indian English speakers is about 95 percent." Getting there required building new datasets, and SpeakX trained its models on voice samples from across regions and language backgrounds, focusing on clarity and intelligibility rather than neutralising accents. The app supports 14 Indian languages, so learners can begin in their mother tongue before gradually shifting into English. It costs Rs 199 per month and runs on entry-level Android phones and low bandwidth networks.
SpeakX began as Yellow Class, a pandemic-era online hobby-learning platform for children that raised a Series A in 2021. When schools reopened, usage fell and retention dropped. By 2023 Mittal chose to pivot to spoken English, based on the observation that a very large number of Indians can read and understand English but struggle to speak it with confidence.
Details
- City
- Gurugram
- Organization
- SpeakX