Play2Speak

Idea

Introduction

We are a Spanish Edtech company and we help you practice your English without the need of a real person. This is done in Virtual Reality (VR), using Artificial Intelligence (AI) characters to have conversations with, while providing a report of your progress.

Can’t go to England to practice your English? No worries, with VR, we bring England to you!

Intended impact

Play2Speak was created to give language learners an alternative to traditional language learning methods. In our informal interviews conducted during our incubation program and hosted demo days, we came across two challenges which have also been reflected in formal studies:

1) Fear of embarrassment, or Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA): Many language learners suffer from a fear of embarrassment when speaking to natives. There are several reasons why this occurs, some rooted to a culture of fear of failure, or of being judged.

2) Lack of contextual learning in current mobile tools: memorising words and sentences without context restricts the rate of learning.

Our solution teleports you to a fun and immersive world, where you can have conversations in English with characters about the place you are visiting. There is no more embarrassment because no one is judging you, and when your experience is over, we score your level and give you a report of your English learning progress.

Substantial accomplishments to date

1st experience (The Secret of Puffin Cove: a B2C product only):
• Since Dec 10th 2018:
• We sold 70 units on SteamVR, at an average price of $8.99US with occasionally 25% off.
• We sold 1,400 bundle units on IndieGala, at $4.49US with some 25% off.

Consultation with CAMBRIDGE ASSESSMENT of English.
We are consulting with Cambridge Assessment English to help us to enhance the learning experience within our virtual reality English language practice game.

We have been awarded:.
• 1,000€ for most innovative startup at the 2018 SIMO Education Innovation competition (Impulso), in Spain.
• 100,000$ US in credit for Google Cloud Service, for 2 years.
• 1,000$ US monthly credit at IBM (Watson), for 1 year.

Accelerators, incubators and pitch competitions.
• We have completed the OARSIS VR/AR/MR incubator programme in Madrid, Spain.
• We have won the Google Entrepreneurs Startup Weekend in 2017.
• We were finalists (top 15 out of 507) at the 2018 EU Startup Summit competition, in Barcelona.
• We were finalists (Top 100) at the South Summit 2018 EdTech competition – EnlightED.
• We were finalists at the Web Summit 2018 Pitch and demo competitions.

Write ups:
• Forbes.
• El Economista.
• Emprendedores.
• El Pais Retina.
• RealoVirtual.
• Universidad Camillo José Cela.
(see links on our webpage www.play2speak.com)

Monetisation strategy

We aim to sell our product to Academies, schools and corporations throughout Spain, via a monthly subscription of our SaaS (software as a service). If the customer needs a device, we plan to resell them a commercial license for a standalone VR headset, too.

Having already sold The Secret of Puffin Cove through B2C channels (VR marketplaces, such as Viveport and SteamVR), we have taken some learnings from this. We believe the VR mainstream market is not yet ready as a whole because of low VR headset adoption with an estimated only 4 million VR headsets sold. Therefore, by focusing on channels where VR headsets can either be purchased with ease (large corporations) or used by many users (academies and schools), we can insert standalone VR headsets into the market and help overcome the initial barrier of needing the user to buy their own device.

Use of proceeds

We intend to use the proceeds from this raise to fund the game’s development. This is through constructing a new experience for all major platforms but in specification for the standalone VR headsets, containing main game mechanics for the first version. In addition, we aim to use part of the funds to rent a co-working space in Madrid, vital for keeping the team together as well as help funding the operations of the business.

Play2Speak has a €5,000 directors loan with Giuseppe Fantigrossi. The loan expires in December 2019 with a 2% variable interest. The capital raised in this round is not to pay back this loan.