‘You don’t expect your bank to fail’: Surviving SVB chaos & the future of edtech – Lingumi co-founder Toby Mather

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UKTN

Technology, Entrepreneur, Tech, Business, Hr, Sales, Uktech, Investing, Funding, Entrepreneurship, Marketing

5 • 6 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Toby Mather, CEO of Lingumi, shares his first-hand account as a startup founder who scrambled to withdraw company funds from Silicon Valley Bank UK as the crisis unfolded.

The edtech startup held most of its funds with SVB UK. Like thousands of other startups, Lingumi worried whether it would be able to pay staff and invoices. Mather recounts his rollercoaster experience of the weekend that rocked UK tech, and his amazement at the "Dunkirk-style effort" in government to save the country’s tech startups. Elsewhere on the show, Mather talks about the impact of ChatGPT in education and the “healthy” discipline the tech downturn is creating for startups.

Lingumi is a smart tutoring platform that uses AI to create interactive courses for young learners. It has more than two million users, mostly in Asia, using the platform to learn how to read and speak languages. Prior to founding Lingumi, Mather studied modern languages at the University of Oxford, and worked as an EFL teacher, during which time he began developing the idea for Lingumi.

Transcript

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0:00.0	As a startup, you are taking a lot of risk, as an entrepreneur taking a lot of risk.
0:10.2	You expect to fail yourself many, many, many ways.
0:12.8	You don't expect your bank to fail.
0:17.2	I think founders were like cats and we never quite sure which life we're on.
0:20.7	And I thought maybe we were on a three or four and it felt like something we're on eight or nine very quickly.
0:26.6	It's pretty exciting to imagine that you could take a real human teacher,
0:31.6	you could train models based on their voice, based on their knowledge, based on state curriculums,
0:36.6	and then you could render versions of that
0:38.4	teacher for students.
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1:25.6	Hello and welcome to the UKTN podcast, a weekly conversation with founders of some of the UK's high-growth tech companies.
1:35.6	Each episode, we will talk through the founder's personal journey, their vision for their business and their views of the wider tech industry.
1:43.0	I'm Jane Wakefield and I'm joined today by Toby
1:45.6	Maither, the co-founder and CEO of Educational Technology Startup, Lingumi. Welcome, Toby.
1:52.9	Thanks, Jane. Great to be here. Now, Toby, we are going to talk about Lingumi and the general
1:57.5	ed tech industry in a minute, but first of all, we need to talk about a story
	...

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