Eevi Raises Rockstart-Led Pre-Seed to Tackle Language Learning’s "Fluency Illusion"

Dutch AI language-learning startup Eevi has closed a pre-seed round led by Rockstart, a European startup accelerator, as investors keep backing voice-first tutoring products even as overall education funding stays tight. The amount was not disclosed.

Founded in 2025 and based in Amsterdam, Eevi was started by chief executive Filemon Schöffer and chief technology officer Jago Gazendam. Schöffer previously co-founded Hubs.com (3D Hubs), which Protolabs acquired in a deal valued at up to US$330 million, and later served as chief commercial officer at mental-health platform OpenUp. Gazendam brings a background spanning education and health technology.

The app targets international professionals and argues that the industry has optimized for the wrong skill. More than one billion people worldwide are learning a new language, but only a small share ever reach conversational fluency. Eevi calls this the "fluency illusion": learners build long streaks and steady vocabulary recognition, then freeze the moment a real person speaks to them.

Human tutors close that gap but are expensive and scarce. Eevi argues real-time voice AI offers a third path, and that progress in speech models during 2025 finally made conversation with an AI tutor natural enough to build a business on.

Development began in the summer of 2025, followed by a closed beta from January to June 2026 with roughly 100 users. The most important lesson, Schöffer said, was interface design: the team began with a conventional chat window that displayed text while the user spoke, then found that reading and talking at the same time degraded the experience.

Eevi rebuilt around a voice-first interface — a blank canvas on which the tutor drops multimedia only when it is useful, such as an audio player for listening practice, rather than a running transcript. Its curriculum draws on more than 15 academic language-learning frameworks and covers over 150 topics and situations, from family life to supermarket shopping and dining out.

The company reckons that mastering around 500 words in context covers roughly 80% of everyday conversation, and it tracks each learner’s progress in a personal memory bank. Eevi currently uses Google’s Gemini as its speech model and supports about 14 languages, including Japanese, Indonesian and Chinese. Pricing is €49 for six months or €18 per month, with B2B pilots planned in the Dutch startup ecosystem.

Longer term, Schöffer wants Eevi to work on dialects and endangered languages and to reduce its dependence on third-party model providers: "we don’t want to be dependent on LLM providers long term, especially as a European company." For now, the priority is proving commercial success in major languages first.

He framed the raise as a bet on speed. Eevi ran on its own money for nearly 12 months and could have continued, but in a fast-moving market pace matters more than dilution, and the right investors test your thinking and open up hiring networks. Rockstart managing partner Max ter Horst said AI is reshaping education and work, and that conversational foreign-language skills will matter more for economic mobility, inclusion and global cooperation.

The deal follows a run of funding in the category: last week Israel’s Loora closed a US$22 million Series B, taking its total to US$43.25 million. Over the next 12 months Eevi plans to hire core team members and scale toward a public launch.