Leaders

The e-Learning industry has grown significantly over the last couple of years and with more educators as well as policy makers encouraging increasing adoption of technology in education, the market is expected to continue its impressive growth in the coming years.

ALPA Kids is a pioneering business organization which develops e-Learning games for children aged 2-8. The company focuses on less spoken languages including English with Indian cultural elements, Hindi, Marathi, Estonian, and Ukrainian. Kelly Lilles is the Co-Founder & CEO of ALPA Kids, and under her guidance the company has been able to make impressive strides. She has a Master's degree in Translation Studies which is a highly practical field and it still has an extremely high impact on what she does now. Kelly comes from a family of teachers and as a child, she wanted to become a teacher as well, but later chose the path of technology and spent a decade in the public sector leading Pan- European language technology projects.

In an exclusive interview with women entrepreneur, Kelly Lilles gives more insights into the operations of ALPA Kids and her journey as a business leader.

1. What motivated you to co-found ALPA Kids? Tell us about the underlying idea behind the venture and some of its most unique features.

We started ALPA Kids out of our own need. We lived abroad with our young children and missed our native language which is Estonian - a tiny language spoken by a million people. And even though Estonia is one of the most digital countries in the world and according to OECD Estonia is the new education powerhouse of Europe, exceeding even Finland, we did not have any native language e-Learning to offer our children.

There are over 7000 languages spoken in the world, but quality e-Learning is available only in the top spoken languages. This sets all other children in an unequal position as children in their foundational years learn best in their native language. I saw an opportunity to develop e-Learning games together with the best teachers and researchers in the field for children

in their foundational years. Having a background in translation studies, I knew exactly how it should be built to be easily localizable even with customizing the learning games with the elements of each culture, so in our games, children see the birds, the animals, the flowers and cultural elements that they can relate to.

2. What are the different responsibilities you shoulder as the co-founder & CEO of ALPA Kids? What are your primary focus areas in terms of driving growth for the company?

Starting off, my most important responsibility was to put together the best team to execute, and now, a couple of years later, I would say that keeping up the team spirit is still one of my key roles. As we are a very fast-paced company, we all have to grow together with it. As CEOs we all have a lot of responsibility on our shoulders, so delegation and prioritizing are extremely important. My main focus in addition to the team is goal-setting, funding and high-level partnerships.

"Technology will never replace teachers but it can be a great tool for them especially when it comes to the personalization of education"

3. Throw some light on the most critical business challenges you face in terms of building digital learning solutions in native languages? How do you overcome these roadblocks?

In the field of educational technology, I think every company faces the challenge of very diversified approaches toward education. For example, India and Europe are very different regarding education systems and a way to overcome this challenge is to respect and learn. I love to spend a lot of time in our target markets to learn about the culture and education system. Building a solution in native languages is more exciting than challenging. It is wonderful to work with such a multilingual country as India and learn about languages like Tamil, Kannada, and many more.

4. How has Alpa Kids’ growth journey been so far? Tell us about some of the key milestones achieved by the firm since its inception.

Our growth has been extremely rapid. Looking back at 2022, it seems like three years could fit in that one year. We catered 600K+ users, which is 6x more than in 2021. We added 6 new languages to our portfolio - 5 of them are languages spoken in India. We attracted paying customers from 79 countries and our MRR increased 4x. We also won many awards last year, but one of the most heart-warming ones is the award “With Children, For Children “given out by the President of the Estonian Republic. Also, our company’s participation at Didac India was exceptional as the traction, exposure and feedback at the event was really unexpected.

5. How do you intend to leverage technology to enhance education solutions? What is your roadmap for ALPA Kids’ next phase of growth?

Technology will never replace teachers but it can be a great tool for them especially when it comes to the personalization of education. Too many students tend to be in one group or class, so it is really difficult to notice all the personal interests and skills of each child, but here technology combined with well-advised data usage can do so much. Together with researchers, we have developed a set of tools coupled with our content to track the progress of children, recommend learning content suitable for each individual child, and to send out a notification to the teacher and/or parent if there seems to be a deviation from normal progress. This makes learning a lot more efficient and sets a really strong foundation for the most important years of child development. This is something that we will implement in all the markets that we are already active in and also to the range of new markets that we are opening in 2023.

Kelly Lilles, Co-Founder & CEO, Alpa Kids

This pioneering business leader aspires to ensure constant innovation through consistent improvement. Under her guidance, the company has won numerous accolades over the years including Winner of ‘Best research project in Tallinn University’ 2021, Winner of the Estonian ‘Language Act 2021’ award by the Ministry of Education and Research, and Winner of ‘AI marathon’ of Tehnopol Startup Incubator.