BoldVoice, an app that coaches non-native English speakers on pronunciation and accent, raised $21m in a Series A round announced on 28 January 2026. Matrix led the round, with Flybridge, Xfund, Corazon Capital, Alumni Ventures, Umami Capital and Y Combinator also taking part. AlleyWatch reported that strategic angels, including founders of Udemy, Blinkist and Super, invested too.
The round brings BoldVoice's total funding to $27.1m, according to AlleyWatch, which implies about $6.1m raised earlier. The sources do not report an earlier round by name or a valuation.
“We're giving a billion non-native English speakers a personal voice coach.”Anada Lakra, co-founder and CEO, BoldVoice
What BoldVoice does
Users record their speech and receive instant, phoneme-level feedback from speech models trained for accent and pronunciation, alongside video lessons from expert voice and accent coaches. The company's website describes lessons from coaches including Hollywood dialect coaches, with AI feedback on pronunciation, stress and clarity. The app is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play, and new users get a seven-day free trial.
Pulse 2.0 reported that traditional coaching costs $200 to $300 an hour, and that BoldVoice says unlimited on-demand practice costs less than one coaching session over a full year. The sources do not list its plan prices, and the cost comparison is the company's own positioning rather than an independent finding.
Chief executive and co-founder Anada Lakra said in the announcement: "We're giving a billion non-native English speakers a personal voice coach." Co-founder and chief technology officer Ilya Usorov said speech feedback only works if it is extremely precise. Lakra told AlleyWatch that accent bias is a real problem affecting hundreds of millions of people.
Traction
BoldVoice says it has more than five million downloads, with professionals using it in more than 150 countries, and has recently passed $10m in annual recurring revenue. Those are company-reported figures. The company has seven employees, according to the announcement, Pulse 2.0 and AlleyWatch.
Lakra also told AlleyWatch that BoldVoice did not need to raise, adding that the company's burn is low and its runway is long. He described that as often the best time to raise.
What the money is for
The announcement said the funds will support global expansion, new AI-powered coaching capabilities and proprietary speech models. AlleyWatch listed the company's priorities for the next six months as expanding its AI beyond pronunciation, growing globally and adding roles in growth, product and engineering, and Pulse 2.0 said it is hiring across growth, product and engineering.
Kojo Osei, a partner at Matrix, said the founders are defining a new category in professional communication and that the firm was excited to support their growth.
The sources do not state where BoldVoice is headquartered, although the announcement carried a New York dateline, so this article does not name a city. They also do not say when the company was founded. Lakra and Usorov are the two co-founders named in the coverage.
Company website: boldvoice.com