TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Voxy is announcing new Series A investment today, $2.8 million dollars from investors Seavest Inc, ff Venture and Contour Ventures. Relatively new investor Seavest recently had another education-related portfolio company, Schoolnet, sell for $230 million to education publisher Pearson.
In addition to the financing, Voxy is launching its newest product, an iPhone app which teaches English to Portuguese speakers (thus far all its offerings have been English to Spanish speakers).
In the same space as Live Mocha, Voxy differentiates itself through culling content from every day life materials like media and conversations and is mobile first. “We believe that in many developing markets people will be leapfrogging browser-based applications in favor of mobile devices” founder Paul Gollash tells me. Voxy offers both free and premium services — the smartphone product starting at $2.99 a month for users who want added features.
Gollash plans on using the new funding to hire more engineers, scale product and improve already existing technology. His future plans including offering English to Spanish versions of the service and expanding to other languages and markets. “We’re going to continue to leverage mobile in order to meet the needs of users who lack the time, money and access to use traditional browser-based and offline methodologies,” he says.
Gollash also tells me that one day after launching in the Brazilian market , Voxy is already a top ten app in the category of education. The population of Brazil is 193 million.