On 21 January 2026, Preply — the online language-learning marketplace founded in 2013 by Ukrainians Kirill Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn — announced a $150 million Series D at a $1.2 billion valuation, led by WestCap. It is a genuinely inspiring milestone, and TechCrunch put it well in describing Preply's unicorn status as embodying Ukrainian resilience.
A profitable, AI-enhanced marketplace
Preply connects more than 100,000 tutors with learners across 180 countries in over 90 languages, pairing human instruction with an AI tutoring co-pilot. Notably, the company reports having been EBITDA-profitable for 12 months before the raise — this is disciplined growth, not growth at any cost.
Part of a bigger pattern
Preply does not stand alone. It joins a widening cohort of Ukrainian-founded companies at scale: Grammarly (now building an AI productivity suite), Creatio (which raised $200M at a $1.2B valuation in 2024), People.ai, and Fintech-IT Group, the developer behind the neobank monobank, which crossed a $1B valuation in late 2025. Together they make a simple point: Ukrainian founders keep building category-defining companies — and increasingly raising external capital — even during the hardest years.
For investors and partners in Singapore and APAC, stories like Preply's are more than headlines. They are evidence of a founder culture that ships, scales and stays profitable — exactly the kind of teams a cross-border tech bridge exists to connect.