Language-Learning Platform Chatterbox Bags £1.5m To Expand Services for Refugees and Marginalised Groups 

• Founded by Afghani refugee Mursal Hedayat MBE and Y Combinator alumna Guillemette Dejean, Chatterbox is a refugee-powered online language learning platform for professionals - working with Unilever, FTI Consulting and the British Red Cross

• The startup will expand into new services helping corporates engage with people from marginalised talent pools such as refugees

• £1.5m pre-seed led by GMG Ventures with investment from Phil Libin’s All Turtles

London, 15 March 2022 - Online language-learning platform Chatterbox has raised over £1.5m investment in a pre-seed round led by GMG Ventures, to expand its services helping businesses tap the huge wealth of talent in refugee and marginalised communities.

The startup, which emerged from Brent Hoberman’s Founders Factory accelerator programme, received funding from Mustard Seed Maze, RLC Ventures, and Softbank.

Having established a renowned client roster including Unilever, PwC and the British Red Cross, Chatterbox will now use the funding to develop its “diversity as a service” offering with new products and services. The remote-first startup is currently making strategic hires across product development, learning, sales and marketing.

This will fuel Chatterbox’s mission of connecting the world's most talented, yet marginalised, people with rising opportunities in the digital economy.

According to the UK government, advertised tech vacancies have more than doubled since 2020 - hitting a record 160,887 in recent months. As tech firms struggle with The Great Resignation and the ‘war for talent’, Chatterbox hopes to help them tap the estimated 40 million degree-educated professionals currently living across OECD countries who are either long-term unemployed or underemployed. These are often professionals from marginalised groups including single parents, older workers and refugees - which have risen dramatically in recent years following successive conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and more recently, Ukraine. 

Mursal Hedayat, Founder & CEO of Chatterbox, said:

“As we’re seeing from the Ukrainian crisis, unfortunately, we live in a world where mass displacement of talented people from war, famine and even climate change is increasingly commonplace. Whether it’s single parents, disabled workers or even refugees - this funding will help us further our mission of helping businesses engage with this amazing pool of marginalised talent, especially as the pandemic accelerates the shift towards globally distributed and remote-first firms.”

Sam Rickard, Director at GMG Ventures said:

"Chatterbox enables businesses to access a valuable pool of talent, creating employment opportunities for refugees and other marginalised communities. We have been following the team's progress since our first meeting in early 2019 and we are excited to support them through the next stage of their growth."

Chatterbox was launched in 2016 by Afghani refugee Mursal Hedayat MBE in response to the Syrian war and based on her own mother’s experience of struggling to find highly-skilled work in the UK when the family moved from Afghanistan. It initially started out as an online language learning school to help Syrian refugees earn a living by teaching Arabic to professionals looking to improve their language skills but has since grown to encompass other refugee and marginalised groups - with a proven track record of increasing team cultural intelligence, morale and engagement. 

About Chatterbox

Chatterbox is on a mission to shake things up in the labour market by connecting the world's most talented, yet marginalised, people with opportunities in the digital economy. Their first product is an AI-powered, award-winning online language learning platform that employs marginalised people in need of work to teach their native languages. Businesses use Chatterbox’s state of the art, AI-powered technology, blended with immersive human practice classes to build faster real-world fluency and drive faster success in their learning programmes. Chatterbox has sparked interest from the likes of the Guardian and the BBC, as well as backing from leading investors in Europe and Silicon Valley, as a social innovation capable of radically and permanently tipping the scales towards a more just global economy. Founded in 2016 by Mursal Hedayat MBE and co-founder Guillemette Dejean (Fliplingo, UpLabs), Chatterbox operates out of London and Lisbon. 

About GMG Ventures

 GMG Ventures LP is an early-stage venture capital fund. It leads and prices funding rounds to support exceptional founders building technology-enabled products, at the intersection of the technology and media sectors. GMG Ventures Fund I has one limited partner, The Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group as well as an endowment fund and other assets.

About Founders Factory

As the world's leading venture studio and accelerator, Founders Factory builds and scales technology startups solving global problems.

Founded in 2015 by Brent Hoberman, Henry Lane Fox and George Northcott, Founders Factory combines capital and bespoke support from a team of over 100 specialists with a broad network of corporates and established entrepreneurs.

The Founders Factory portfolio includes over 200 category-defining tech companies globally, 45+ of which have been built from scratch in its Venture Studio. Their partners include Aviva, L’Oreal, Guardian Media Group, EasyJet, Reckitt, Chinese private equity firm CSC Group and Standard Bank.

For all enquiries please contact Claire Jones, Head of B2B Marketing