What happened to Colingo?

It announced it had raised $2.4M in seed funding in Novemeber 2013. In January, it seems to be shut down but there are no official farewell message. It looks like the founders abandonned the boat.

 


  • Yea, it seems that way. Edtech websites in general are difficult to make succeed, so Colingo had that going against it already. However, they also seem to have had a model where it was through online video, so the tutor and the person paying for the lesson would be talking via skype or some other method.

    That can get costly, especially for the customers. I’m not going to pay $15 an hour or whatever their price is for something that I could learn for free from Duolingo or another site, where I could learn at my own pace.

    • Duolingo and Colingo are totally different.

      Duolingo is a platform where you can learn a language by translating some texts. Colingo (same as Verbling) was offering live lessons with native English speakers. Their expenses per user are totally different.

      For the first few months, Colingo was free; it was obviously really expensive to offer a teacher 24/7 on their website: ($15 per hour, 24 hours per day, 30 days per month = $10,800 per month (just for the teachers). That’s a bit heavy to support for a startup.

      In October they offered a monthly fee of $50 per month in order to have your own academic advisor to help you progress… I really don’t know how structured was the academic part it looks like it didn’t work.

      It is really strange that a company with so many users disappeared without a single farewell message.

      …well, looking at the founders, it is what you can expect:

      Founder1: Willy Wonka (aka Benjamin Lowenstein): youtu.be/LZFzboE2fPc

      Founder2: Andrew Mason (aka Lee Jacobs): youtu.be/s6nbVL0cLbc

  • That’s a lot of money to blow through in 5 months. Maybe they took it and ran.

    Or returned some of it to investors.

    • My bet is that they never received the money.

      They announced the investment which was partly a real investment intention and partly a marketing strategy to see if their subscription model would finally catch up. Since they probably didn’t get a satisfying number of signups with all the free press, the investors turned down the offer and Colingo didn’t receive a penny. Because of their crazy burn rate, the founders abandoned the ship.

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