Hello and welcome back to Equity, the Tech Ranch Podcast, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines.

This is Alex, Good Morning. Today is February 21st, 2024, and welcome to our Wednesday show,

where we dig into critical startup and venture capital stories

from the week thus far.

Now, if you were with us yesterday,

you're probably asking, hey, it's a holiday week has enough stuff actually happened to warrant another show and the answer is yes quite a lot has happened and we are going to talk about it on the show today we have AI in language learning, a neat

startup that wants to automate due diligence, Reddit IPO news, and then two new

venture funds for your notebook. Let's go. First on the docket for the startup category, we have a company called L-O-O-O-R-A. Why is it in the news? Well, the company announced today that it just closed a $12 million

series A. Laura, whose namesake is the Arabic word for language, offers learners several AI generated conversation subjects

and scenarios think sports, tech, business, fashion, books, TV, that sort of thing.

Its round was led by QP ventures, bringing the company's total raised capital that we know of

to about 21.25 million dollars.

The thesis behind companies like Laura is that they think that AI can do at scale, what language teachers can't.

Laura itself leans on conversational AI to teach students,

and it has built an iOS app that allows people to talk to an AI chat mod

that then gives them feedback on their English comprehension.

According to one of the company's co-founder Roy Moore, the idea for Laura came with their own frustration from learning language,

and they think that learning language apps today are geared towards beginner or casual learners,

and folks who want a human tutor to get better are a little bit

expensive so they want to split the difference and make a tool that is cheap and

available okay I really get that and I think it's really cool.

At the same time, I do wonder if we all learn to speak from digital robots,

...