Starta Founder Spotlight: Ekaterina Matveeva, Founder of Amolingua
Ekaterina has built an ed:tech company that brings teams together via language, culture and soft skills programs designed for global business.
Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, your background, education, and how you came to start Amolingua.
In English, I’m Kate. However, in every language I speak, every culture I’ve lived in, I have a local version of my name. And that version is connected to the root of my full name, which is Ekaterina. Ekaterina is a Greek name, and it comes from catharsis. In Spanish, I’m Catarina. In Italian, I’m Caterina, In German, I’m Kat.
Why do I have these different versions of my name in different languages and cultures? It’s because I’ve been raised internationally; I’m multilingual and multicultural. When I get immersed in a specific culture, I learn another language, and it’s somewhat like shifting a little bit in your personality.
Part of my family has Greek heritage, part of my family has Polish heritage, and my parents grew up in Mongolia. As they were growing up there, they lost little bits of their identity of where they belonged to.
I was born in Moscow, where my parents met on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I was brought up there and then Warsaw. I lived in nine countries, studied in seven, and traveled and worked in over forty, so I feel that I belong to different places. I’ve got friends, memories, and experiences from all around the world.
I have a vast academic background and various degrees, four at master’s level. I still haven’t got my PhD, but I’ll get to it at some point! All of my degrees are centered around communication; various types of linguistics, such as comparative, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and, of course, cultural analysis, sociocultural anthropology, intercultural psychology, international education.
With this sort of bouquet of disciplines, I’ve been able to put together my own specific theory, which is called Language Alter Ego.
Language Alter Ego is a voluntarily or involuntarily created linguistic personality based on a newly generated behaviour appropriate for a particular socio-cultural environment. A person can have multiple Language Alter Egos. Each language and culture that a person interacts with has its own unique norms, values, and communication styles, and these can shape the development of a distinct aspect of the person’s personality in each language.
Language Alter Ego is what I’ve been experiencing myself while switching behaviors, patterns, empirically as I grew up and traveled around the world.
I’ve been doing this for over 12 years. I’ve written books around it. The second edition of Language Alter Ego was just published. This theory is also the foundation for Amolingua and Lingo+. Here, we’ll be talking mostly about Amolingua, of course.
When I was 14–15, I was lucky to get a scholarship to go around Europe with schoolmates. It was a European voyage to around 10 countries. I was so impressed by the diversity of languages and cultures, and I realized that I needed more languages to communicate, than I already spoke.
And from there, it all began. I started dreaming about building a multilingual, multicultural center or organization where we could help people to understand each other better across borders. I’ve been working on that dream for half of my life.
Your background is very much rooted in cultural and linguistic studies. Amolingua is a huge leap into the business world. How did you make that leap from thinking about language alter ego as a social theory to turning it into a business solution for enterprises?
When I imagined that multilingual, multicultural center, I didn’t know back then how the internet would develop. At that time, I was thinking of building a physical center. As time passed, I realized that the internet was opening up a new opportunity to build the multicultural, multilingual center that I was dreaming of.
I always thought that the way education was structured was fundamentally. And I’m a rebel. As an educator early in my career, I started teaching people from the point of view of a coach, a mentor, somebody who would accompany them on their journey, not just as a source of knowledge.
Because I was traveling around and teaching, I started using many digital, internet-enabled technologies to teach in this new method that I had developed. I started usingSkype and other video apps. Even on the phone, I would have conversations in other languages with my students.
At first, it was a personal practice. As I was finalizing my fourth Masters degree at St. Andrews, I met and worked with some very nice business advisors who were looking at what I had with this private teaching practice. And they told me, “you need to put it all together somehow.”
In 2015 and 2016, I put a team together and we started shaping what would become Amolingua. At first, we were building a product for the B2C market, because that’s what I knew.
I was applying to incubators, trying out competitions, because I had absolutely no business background. I was a humanities girl. I didn’t know the difference between a startup and a traditional business; for me, a startup was a business that you are just starting!
I participated in various competitions. One of them was GEN — Global Entrepreneurship Network. Every year they organise Startup Open competition, with a few thousands of startups applying to be selected among the top ones.
In November 2015 I got notified that we were selected into the top 50 startups by StartUp Open, and then CNBC and MSN put us in their top 20 startups in the world in 2015. It was insane, because we were just at the idea stage then. Within two weeks, I was in the semifinals and then finals of the UK national competition the Gradfactor.
I went to London to the headquarters of RBS and successfully pitched in the finals. I was awarded the title of UK Businesswoman 2015 in the Gradfactor competition. Suddenly, we had all of it: lots of PR, amazing perks, great people, and amazing companies to help us on our journey. And then, out of all this mess, this chaos, the brand of Amolingua was born.
From there, we were pushing forward, experimenting, seeing whether it was going to be a lifestyle business, whether it was going to be a proper startup. We had a few failures in tech, which was also very good for an entrepreneur like myself who was just starting. I had to learn to never give up, to be resilient. We had a failure with the first app, just didn’t work out, students were not ready for that technology, and then we had a failure with a platform, first, which was before the pandemic.
However, during the pandemic, we got a grant from the European Union, Erasmus+, which was fantastic. It gave us the opportunity to create a special project which is now another company, Lingo+, which is focusing on multilingual, multicultural training for teachers at schools and universities. At the same time, it also gave us an opportunity to work on our tech side and properly focus on how we are going to create this ecosystem of demand and supply to scale.
One of my biggest fears in the past was, “how can we organize all of these new clients if we don’t have the right tech? And what if we have more people demanding our product, service, and we don’t have enough people to serve them?” We had to dig in further on creating courses, creating materials that can be used without teachers’ assistance, and we kind of managed to package them into a proper product. And then we started getting more and more traction from entrepreneurs. Professionals would tell their bosses about our courses in language, culture, and soft skills. Last year, we realized that we are switching more and more to a B2B model because we started getting partnerships that would bring us clients and students in groups. That’s the whole evolution of Amolingua.
It’s been a road of experimentation: we were starting in Europe, but then we focused more and more on Latin America. And Latin America eventually allowed us to achieve milestones that would take us to the U.S. because Latin American companies have headquarters in U.S. and work with American clients. So maybe because clients are there, why not go there? And that’s how we ventured here.
What does success look like for your clients? And then how do you measure that success within your company?
When clients come to us, it usually happens at the stage of a language barrier. They may say, “we’re trying to communicate to our clients, we’re trying to expand the business, but we don’t know their language.” Many U .S. companies now go into Latin America and no one in the company speaks Spanish. And they can’t just expect them to speak English.
We start at the language stage: we have all the materials, all the methodologies necessary so that they can grasp all their everyday vocabulary. But it’s not just vocabulary and grammar. It’s more about the flow, communication, the understanding of what they’re trying to convey. And from there, we go into more specific vocabulary. It’s called “language for specific purposes” (LSP). This is where we go into language specific to divisions within companies, such as IT, marketing, sales or HR. And we also have more LSP courses such as Medical Spanish, hospitality, manufacturing and other sectors in various languages.
You can overcome a language barrier with any app. But in order to convey your thoughts the way you want to, to learn how to adjust to another communication style, another rhythm, a melody, you also need to take into account the cultural aspects, the mindset. And that is what we aim to do at Amolingua. We train people in cultural intelligence. We aim for people to understand themselves better, and then they start understanding the client better.
The final result is that our clients become more perceptive, adaptable, open-minded, and it’s easier for them to connect with their clients and employees from other cultures. Our training increases talent retention, employee engagement and productivity in culturally diverse teams. This is quantifiable, and we can calculate how much companies can save on role turnover. Given that we expand working with immigrant and refugee communities preparing them for entry level positions at companies across sectors, we believe this will be another facet of success for big companies who are currently experiencing shortage of talent for entry positions.
Let’s look into the future. Where is Amolingua five years from now?
We’re on this mission to create a better-connected, multicultural, multilingual world. What we’re trying to do is help people and businesses understand each other better, because we are similar, but we’re also very different.
If within the following 5 years we can help thousands of businesses with international talent acquisition and upskill talented young professionals coming from diverse cultural backgrounds to access opportunities they deserve, that would be a big success. And also, we can’t forget about families of immigrant workers who also need cultural and language adaptation. We’re very excited to explore that area as well. I believe it’s crucial to educate families on how to maintain bilingual/multilingual households and also become bicultural/multicultural. There is a lot to do. And I cannot wait to see how it will unfold.
Does everything go full circle back to the humanities for you? Do you think you will ever return to the academic side of your journey with language and cultures?
After this is all said and done, I’ll probably go into astrophysics. Because I’m an astrophysics girl!. You should watch my Planetarium talk “Where Astrophysics Meets Linguistics” where I talk about the challenge of building a shared cognitive map with allies. When we talk about soft skills, I would call them, actually, life skills. We can all get trained on hard skills, and we now see how AI is taking over some hard skills. However, soft skills, this is what helps us to connect. In order to survive, we need to learn how to adapt, especially in our ever-changing world.
How has Starta helped you and your company succeed? Why did you choose Starta?
When I came to Starta, I realized that the team was so versatile, so international, and I knew that they would get these issues, these problems. And this experience here, I am really grateful for it, because all the support from coaches, mentors, sessions, workshops, has been great. I really feel the impact, and I feel that people here really want to and enjoy supporting us. I knew immediately during our interviews with Starta that they understood this business and could help us and support us.
