Vocal Image, an Estonia-based startup, has reached four million app downloads. The company aims to help people improve their voice and communication skills through AI-powered coaching. With 160,000 active users, its CEO, Nick Lakhoika, may best embody the company’s mission. Born in Belarus, Lakhoika did not speak English until he relocated to Estonia and once struggled with speaking anxiety. Despite this, he went on to win many pitch competitions on behalf of the voice coaching startup, which was inspired by his personal journey.
Lakhoika shared that he was bullied at school for having unclear diction. In his early twenties, as a young and insecure founder, he met a vocal coach named Maryna Rusia Shukiurava. She taught him that voice and communication are skills that can be trained. To help others, they started a YouTube channel that eventually evolved into Vocal Image. The subscription-based app is positioned as an affordable alternative to one-on-one coaching that can be used at home, providing a safe space to practice making strange movements and sounds.
The app features an interactive library that includes tongue twisters, breathing exercises, and advice on gestures. Vocal Image is increasingly leveraging AI to provide automated feedback and personalized tips, a development greatly aided by the addition of co-founder and CTO Mikalai Karaliou.
These guided journeys primarily focus on work-related goals like enhancing professional or leadership skills and developing public speaking abilities. The app also supports individuals who want to increase their self-confidence, as well as LGBTQ people. Shukiurava had been supporting LGBTQ rights in Belarus.
Although the three co-founders are from Belarus, they were among the many Belarusian founders who left the country after protests failed to oust President Alexander Lukashenko and were met with brutal repression. Lakhoika chose Estonia for its favorable business environment.
Shortly after moving to Tallinn, Vocal Image joined the local accelerator Startup Wise Guys, which considers the startup one of its success stories due to its rapid growth. Lakhoika stated the startup subsequently reached $6.5 million in annual recurring revenue on less than $1 million in pre-seed funding.
The startup recently raised a $3.6 million seed round led by French edtech VC firm Educapital, with participation from Estonia’s Specialist VC and Germany’s Generations Fund. As of August, the startup claims $12 million in annual recurring revenue and approximately 50,000 paid users.
With a team of 20 people, which includes a majority of Belarusian exiles, Vocal Image plans to grow its development team and deploy more localizations. The app already supports English, Spanish, German, French, Ukrainian, and Russian.
This new funding follows the startup’s selection by Hugging Face, Meta, and Scaleway as one of the five winners of their European AI Startup Program. However, it also comes at a time of increasing competition. For instance, edtech company Headway recently added an AI-powered speech trainer to its social skills app, Skillsta. Vocal Image can rely on its own GDPR-compliant AI trove to compete.
With roughly 35,000 recordings per day, Vocal Image has amassed more than one million real-voice samples. These recordings are labeled by the community through a collaborative feature called Voice Rating, which lets users decide whether others sound confident or childlike. This kind of dataset is crucial for improving the accuracy of apps like Vocal Image. It could also help AI startups fine-tune their artificial voices, creating further opportunities for growth beyond its business-to-consumer roots.