companies

ELSA Corp

San Francisco company behind ELSA Speak, an AI app that gives non-native speakers real-time pronunciation and fluency feedback.

ELSA Corp was founded in 2016 by Vu Van, a Vietnamese entrepreneur who studied education and business at Stanford, together with speech technologist Xavier Anguera, who built the company's speech-recognition models. The app, ELSA Speak, was built specifically around pronunciation and spoken fluency rather than the vocabulary and grammar drills that dominate most language apps, using speech models trained to catch specific mispronounced sounds rather than just accept a rough approximation. The company has raised about $60 million from investors including Gradient Ventures (Google's AI-focused fund), UOB and Vietnam Investments Group. ELSA now reports more than 90 million learners and over 92 million app downloads globally, with a stated 4.9-star average rating across app stores, and sells subscriptions to individual learners alongside business and school plans for organizations and language programs.

Founded

2016

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

applications