OKpanda Lands $1.4M From 500 Startups, Mafia Wars & Tapjoy Founders To Bring Better English Language Learning To Asia

With the rise of the Mobile Era, a growing number of startups are trying to revolutionize the way we learn languages by giving us access to learning content and translation from anywhere, especially on the go. Like the popular Duolingo, many of these services and apps focus on teaching English, Spanish, German and other romance languages, but few have focused solely on the Asian market — particularly Japan.

That's how a new startup called OKPanda hopes to stand out from the noise. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur and app developer Adam Gries and Nir Markus, the former co-founder and CTO of popular multiplayer-games-as-a-service startup PlayerDuel, OKPanda wants to help change the way people learn English in Asia, beginning with Japan.

To support its mission, OKPanda has raised $1.4 million in a round led by Resolute Ventures, with participation from firms like Innovation Endeavors, Kapor Capital and 500 Startups. A handful of angel investors also contributed to the startup's first financing effort, including the founder of Karma and Tapjoy Lee Linden, the former chairman of APAX Asia Max Burger, Producteev founder Ilan Abehassera and Mafia Wars co-founder Roger Dickey.

While OKPanda is hardly the first English language learning service to tackle the Japanese market, the co-founders still believe there's a lot of opportunity that's been left untapped in Japan. For starters, Gries tells us, most services have failed to offer enough conversational practice in modern, colloquial English. In other words, English that native speakers actually speak — not one that's been reinterpreted by those who aren't fluent.

The co-founders are also encouraged by a number of changes and fluctuations that are happening throughout Asia that could be a good sign for OKPanda's approach. For starters, Japan is one of the largest language learning markets in Asia — second only to China — with approximately $5 billion being spent on these services, not including peripherals like translation and test prep. With these peripherals, the market is actually something closer to $8 billion.

Furthermore, Rakuten and Uniqlo, two multinational Japanese giants recently mandated that English become the language used for all internal communication. In other words, their default languages. Japanese companies want to grow with the changing global markets, and Gries says there's a sense in Japan that, at least on the English learning front, they just haven't been able to have the same success as others.

Although its app isn't launched yet — Gries says he expects it to launch before December — its first generation will be an iPhone app. Historically, that would have been a risky move, but lately Japanese carriers have begun to offer the iPhone, with one of the potentially biggest watershed moments coming for iPhone adoption in Japan when NTT Docomo — which owns some 44 percent of the market — finally inked a deal with Apple and began offering coverage. (Not that it hasn't come with a few hiccups.)

In spite of having spent billions on learning English over the last decade, Japan has suffered from middling performance and was the third lowest ranked country in Asia for the speaking part of the TOEFL standardized test in 2012. That's why Gries says that Okpanda will be focusing on listening and speaking first, which are "key needs in the Asian markets."

Not only that, but they'll be framing the language learning experience in a mobile context that they hope will be appealing to Asian learners, using hundreds of thousands of interactive conversations in which students speak with avatars in dynamic formats (from the comfort of their phone).

The startup has been working out of New York City up until this point, but they've also recently opened offices in Tokyo, where most of the team will be for the next few months. The co-fouders tell us that their first mobile-centric English learning product will debut in Japan by December, but they plan to expand to other Asian markets after that. And depending on how it goes, OKpanda could be headed beyond Asia in 2014 or 2015.

After all, there are two billion English language learners out there and, as Dave McClure of 500 Startups reminds us, "English is the de facto global language and there's a mobile phone in everyone's pocket."

Okpanda wants to make mobile language learning both fun and easy, and "these days Japan could use more of both, especially with the history of naughty companies that promise English learning but don't deliver."

To help it follow through on its own promise, Okpanda has recruited an impressive advisory board to complement its new investors, which include educational and user behavior experts including Professor Karen Price, formerly the Associate Director of Harvard English Teachers' Program, Learnist founder Farbood Nivi and Farmville and Red Hot Labs co-founder Amitt Mahajan.

Readers looking to test out the product and receive updates on the app's progress (including its launch) can sign up on Okpanda's homepage here.