10 Years of Mondly | 10 Stories – Story 7: At the Mondly Edge

“‘Daca esti prea curios, o sa mori de tânăr’ — ‘if you’re too curious, you’re going to die young’, that’s what my grandma used to tell me,” smiles Co-Founder Alex Iliescu.

“I would go places and do things that were… maybe a bit dangerous sometimes. What does this button do? What’s in this hole?”.

For Alex, new things are to be met with curiosity.

“When you see what’s new — what can be done today — you think ‘wow this is possible’. It makes your brain excited.”

Keeping the engine running

For the Mondly founders, there’s a real link between curiosity and innovation.

“I want people to stay excited about discovering new things, so they keep their engine running — their brain ticking over with new inspiration on what’s possible”.

That mindset is what led to initiatives like buying OpenAI subscriptions for the whole team — just in case.

“Maybe someone will have a sleepless night, they’ll log on and play around, and they’ll discover something. Not everyone, not every time. But sometimes.

“New ideas come. Some of those ideas become new products, then those products become the future.”

Count yourself in

Staying curious democratizes invention; by staying open to new ideas, anyone can come up with the next big one.

“People say ‘oh they were lucky’ or ‘they were entrepreneurs’. We were not. I was 33 when I started Mondly. I’d been a corporate IBM worker for 15 years — I was not always an inventor.

“People count themselves out by saying ‘oh I have a job’ or ‘it has to be done like this’. But there’s always opportunity — to creatively do more, do it differently, do it better.”

Let’s try it

It’s not just about looking at the latest advances in your sector, it’s about taking inspiration from the breadth of new technologies, keeping an open mind on how they might be used.

“It’s so embedded in the Mondly team,” remarks Pearson’s CTO, Gian Paolo Perrucci, “that whenever there’s something new, they think, ‘ok, how can we use that?’”.

“You see a new capability that someone’s developed,” Alex explains, “and you experiment — you try it for your tool, your use case, your product.”

“When you know what today’s state-of-the-art looks like, you look at your own product and see opportunities to improve”.

At the Mondly edge

It’s a mindset that keeps the Mondly team experimenting and improving.

“They’re doing things that are really pushing the boundaries of technologies like VR and hands-free functionalities”, explains Gian Paolo.

“Mondly has been pioneering many of these technology areas, and there’s an appetite to really put technology in the hands of the consumers through the app,” he wraps up.

“They’re risk loving,” agrees Brenden Mielke, VP Product, English Language Learning at Pearson. “They explore new ideas and push the boundaries.”

A pioneering launch

In March 2018, just six months after the release of Mondly VR, the team’s curiosity led to a new milestone: Augmented Reality (AR).

By working closely with experts at Google, the Mondly team of just 21 employees was able to make AR in language learning a reality.

Mondly users could now immerse themselves in a variety of engaging scenarios without even leaving home.

With speech recognition and the ability to verbally submit answers, users were able to speak their way to more confident conversations in 33 different languages.

Launching for ARCore in March and ARKit in July, Mondly users loved the new features, with downloads climbing to 40 million by the end of 2018

The momentum of inspiration

Like all curious inventors, Mondly kept experimenting and improving.

From 2019 to 2021, the team of 40 expanded on their VR and AR offer, launching on OculusGO, Oculus Rift, Steam, and Oculus Quest.

By 2022, users could even take their daily lessons in VR and Mondly became #2 in Top Language Apps by Downloads in Europe.

Their curiosity had led to innovation. And that innovation had built Mondly’s reputation with its users and within the business community.

The next chapter was about to start.

THE MILESTONES 

• Mondly AR launch for ARCore (Mar 2018)
• MondlyAR launch for ARKit (Jul 2018)
• 32 employees (Nov 2018)
• 40 million downloads (Dec 2018)
• Mondly VR Multiplayer launch on OculusGO & GearVR (Apr 2019)
• Mondly VR launch on Oculus Rift (June 2019)
• Mondly VR launch on Steam (Sept 2019)
• 50 million downloads (Oct 2019)
• 60 million downloads (May 2020)
• Mondly VR on Oculus Quest (Aug 2021)
• 100 million users (Feb 2022)
• Daily lessons available in VR (June 2022)