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Наталя ХандусенкоStartup
29 January 2026, 13:43
2026-01-29
Preply is ready to spend millions of dollars on AI infrastructure, currently has 6-7 engineering teams in this direction and large contracts with OpenAI. However, there are problems with hiring AI specialists
Ukrainian online educational platform Preply recently raised $150 million in investment, raising its valuation to $1.2 billion. It plans to use the funds to develop AI tools, among other things. However, finding AI specialists is not so easy. Currently, most IT specialists working in the AI direction have grown within the company.
Ukrainian online educational platform Preply recently raised $150 million in investment, raising its valuation to $1.2 billion. It plans to use the funds to develop AI tools, among other things. However, finding AI specialists is not so easy. Currently, most IT specialists working in the AI direction have grown within the company.
EdTech startup Preply is ready to spend millions of dollars on artificial intelligence infrastructure, said Preply co-founder and CTO Dmitry Voloshyn in an interview with DOU.
According to him, 6-7 product teams are already working on the AI functionality of the online educational platform, which is approximately 35-40 engineers. In addition, the company has large contracts with OpenAI, which is also its strategic partner.
The company is currently building a tutoring copilot — a set of features that will help the learning process. The first key area is Lesson Insights, that is, lesson analysis. Those lessons that take place on the video platform are recorded and transcribed with the consent of students and teachers. Thanks to their own trained ML models, they will be able to automatically determine the student's level.
“Most of the people who work for us in this area of AI grew up within the company. We started early: as soon as the public version of ChatGPT was released, we started building functionality based on it. At that time, there were simply no people on the market, and we had to develop these competencies ourselves,” said the startup’s co-founder.
For example, two engineers who previously worked with ranking algorithms became ML engineers. They mastered a new skill set: how to build infrastructure, train models.
"Writing a prompt for LLM is a simple task; it is much more difficult to understand what the best possible prompt is in a particular case. In addition, quality is important to us, the absence of hallucinations and strange answers from LLM. That is why we work with LLM in production at a very high level," Voloshyn explained.
The company is considering taking an open-source LLM and training it on its own data, or using methods like LoRA to distill something of its own from the base model with better performance.
"But this is a complex project. To implement it, we need AI engineers who already have such experience. And now we don't have such people. So the question is where and when we can hire them," Voloshyn noted.
If the company does this, it will give it even better quality models in the future.
“We have a large dataset, and we believe that LLM can be significantly improved on its basis. Learning with a person is the most effective way to learn a language. LLM models sound robotic, they do many things mechanically. But their work can be brought closer to human interaction, and our dataset will become a good basis,” says the co-founder of Preply.
“We plan to hire about 100 engineers. And we will be very happy if a significant part of these people will be in Ukraine.” What IT specialists is the new Ukrainian “unicorn” Preply looking for
«Важаю, що англійську мову треба зробити другою національною». Співзасновник Preply Кирило Бігай про інвестицію в $50 млн, війну, українське IT та погляд інвесторів на Україну
CEO та співзасновник освітнього сервісу Preply, що минулого тижня залучив $50 млн інвестицій, Кирило Бігай, дав велике інтерв’ю Forbes. Розповідаємо найцікавіше з розмови.
