Loora raises $22M Series B to scale its AI English tutor

Loora, the AI English tutor, announced a $22 million Series B led by Union Tech Ventures, with vgames plus existing investors Emerge, Hearst Ventures, and QP Ventures. The company says the raise brings total funding to $43.25 million and will fund AI research and engineering, go-to-market across the US, Europe, Asia, and South America, and learning-data infrastructure, with headcount expected to double from 30 to 60 within six months.

FINANCE desk — same-day primary that an AI English tutor the company says has reached 15 million learners just closed a disclosed Series B to double the team and expand globally, a concrete money signal in AI for skills and language.

The round was led by Union Tech Ventures, with participation from vgames and existing investors Emerge, Hearst Ventures, and QP Ventures. The company says the raise brings total funding to $43.25 million. None was printed.

Use of proceeds, as the same wire has it: three priorities. Scale AI research and engineering. Accelerate go-to-market — sales and launch work — across the US, Europe, Asia, and South America. Expand the data and research infrastructure that underpins Loora’s learning outcomes.

Hiring, still company: headcount is expected to double from 30 to 60 within six months. The majority of new hires, the company says, will focus on AI research and engineering, plus continued investment in learning science.

Product, as the same wire has it: Loora is a conversational AI English tutor — speaking-practice software that talks with a learner, not a generic chatbot wrapper on someone else’s model. The company says building fluency takes more than connecting users to a frontier model. It says it needs a data flywheel: a system that, from hundreds of millions of real interactions, learns which paths actually produce retention and fluency. Retention here means learners coming back and keeping what they practiced. A large language model, or LLM, is the kind of AI that writes and answers in sentences; the company says general-purpose LLMs are built for breadth — coding, productivity, search — not the personal, iterative work of language learning.

Learner and revenue claims, company-attributed — do not independently certify: 15 million learners worldwide; more than 200 million learner interactions; revenue more than doubled in the last twelve months; annual recurring revenue, or ARR, “in the tens of millions.” ARR is the company’s yearly-run-rate sales figure if current subscriptions kept going. The wire does not print one.

B2B and who uses it, still company: Loora says it built its business-to-business, or B2B, side from scratch over the past year and signed more than 100 corporations, governments, and universities globally. The core user, the company says, is a fluency-driven adult aged 25 to 55, with 72% learning English to advance their careers. Retention, which the company calls one of the clearest indicators of learning outcomes, has more than doubled since launch. The Sep 16 wire does not name those 100 organizations.

Named voices on the release: Roy Mor, CEO; and Roxanne Horesh, managing director at Union Tech Ventures. The wire also names Yonti with Roy as the founding team. Their other quotes are color only and stay in Sources. This is not investment advice.

Opportunity backdrop, still company-attributed: Loora says English fluency is one of the most reliable predictors of advancement, and that 95% of the global population are not native speakers, yet must reach fluency to access the 98.5% of employers across 38 developed economies that use a formal English competency assessment during hiring. The average online human tutor, the company says, ranges from $15 to $50 an hour.

Plain English for the rest of the card: Series B = a growth venture round after Series A. ARR = annual recurring revenue, a yearly-run-rate sales figure. conversational AI English tutor = speaking-practice software that talks with a learner, not a generic chatbot wrapper. data flywheel = a loop where more practice sessions make the tutor better at picking the next useful path. LLM = large language model, the kind of AI that writes and answers in sentences. GTM / go-to-market = sales and launch work in new countries. B2B = selling to companies, governments, and universities, not only to individual app users. fluency = being able to speak and understand English well enough for work or school. headcount = how many people the company employs.