Leslie Omana Begert grew up in a bilingual environment, learning French and Spanish at an early age and, later, adding Mandarin to her communications repertoire.
With those skills, she has worked as a product manager with makeup brand L'Oréal in London, studied art and sculpture in Shanghai and gone into real estate development in Buenos Aires.
"Language has opened a lot of doors for me," she told Inno on a call from Barcelona, where she spent most of her childhood.
And that's something she wanted to share with her children because she knew how much language skills could expand their realm of opportunities in life -- from making friends, to traveling to, someday, finding the right career.
"If you think about it, stories have been central to language learning since the dawn of time."
But she didn't start speaking multiple languages to her son as a newborn. Then, on a trip to visit her grandma in Venezuela she was quickly reminded that she hadn't been speaking Spanish to her son on a regular basis.
"I was like, 'you're right, I dropped the ball,'" Begert said.
That set off a journey that included bilingual books, speaking Spanish to her son and realizing it wasn't working as well as she had hoped. A few years later, she had a daughter and knew she wanted to get it right this time.
That experience helped lead her, and her husband, Mark, a former tech CFO at Meridian Solar and Linktone, to their new venture -- FabuLingua, an Austin-based language learning startup that's now operating in beta.
After operating in stealth for about 18 months, FabuLingua is now raising a pre-seed round that is being led by Gravity Ranch, an early-stage venture capital firm in San Francisco, as well as several angel investors in Austin, Washington, D.C., and New York.
Their language teaching method uses age-appropriate stories and a trademarked style of teaching called Magical Translations, which has children seeing only Spanish text but hearing a narrator alternate between Spanish and English.
The lessons, generally geared for kids ages 2 to 10, are app-based, and they allow users to work through interactive stories progressively with a new story each month (for subscribers who pay $3.99 a month as part of a launch promotion).
For now, it only operates in Spanish and English, but the Begerts plan to expand to other languages in the near future. The couple both have extensive experience in business in China, making it a natural market for them to explore in the years ahead.
To be sure, there are dozens of language teaching apps, books and classes out there, including Duolingo, which is valued at $700 million. But FabuLingua takes a unique approach that blends colorful design, interactivity that allows you to record your own voice as a narrator and to collect rewards and a method of learning called the comprehensible input hypothesis developed by a professor at the University of Southern California.
“It’s turning traditional language learning on its head," Mark said on a call from Austin. "I wish I had been taught this way. If you think about it, stories have been central to language learning since the dawn of time.”
Mark said he had his first Spanish class in Texas in 6th grade, which was both a late start and relied mostly on grammar rules and memorization.
“We believe that a second language can and should be learned and introduced the same as a primary language," he said.
Beyond teaching children, FabuLingua is setting out to become a platform for emerging artists, authors and other creatives. That creates a new outlet for independent storytellers who may not have found a path into big children's book publishing companies, Mark said.
The startup also hopes to ensure its own teams are as diverse as possible.
“What we’re trying to do in building this business is to be very intentional about diversity," Mark said. "We have an unwritten rule that … we need to be very intentional in how we recruit each of our positions in the company.”
