With 4 million app downloads, Estonia-based startup Vocal Image aims to help people improve their voice and communication skills with AI-powered coaching. But out of its 160,000 active users, it may be its CEO, Nick Lahoika, who best embodies its mission. 

Lahoika was born in Belarus, didn’t speak English until his relocation to Estonia, and once struggled with speaking anxiety. Yet, he went on to “win a lot of pitch competitions” on behalf of the voice coaching startup, which was inspired by his journey, he told TechCrunch.

“When I was at school, I was a little bit bullied for unclear diction,” Lahoika said. In his early twenties, as a young, insecure founder, he met a vocal coach, Maryna “Rusia” Shukiurava, who taught him that voice and communication could be trained. 

To help others, they started a YouTube channel that eventually morphed into Vocal Image, which positions its subscription-based app as an affordable alternative to one-on-one coaching you can use at home. “You can make strange movements, strange sounds […] and feel safe,” Lahoika said.

With an interactive library that includes tongue twisters, breathing exercises, and advice on gestures, Vocal Image is also leaning more and more into AI to give automated feedback and personalized tips, thanks in big part to the addition of co-founder and CTO Mikalai Karaliou, Lahoika said.

These guided journeys mostly revolve around work-related goals such as enhancing professional or leadership skills, and developing public speaking or presentation abilities. But Vocal Image also supports people who simply want to increase their self-confidence, as well as LGBTQ people, whose rights Shukiurava had been supporting in Belarus.

While the trio is from Belarus, they were among the many Belarusian founders who left their home country after protests failed to oust President Alexander Lukashenko and were met with brutal repression. Lahoika picked Estonia for its business environment, which has so far proven favorable for the startup.

Shortly after relocating to Tallinn, Vocal Image joined local accelerator Startup Wise Guys, which considers the startup as one of its “success stories” due to its fast growth. According to Lahoika, the startup subsequently reached $6.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) on less than $1 million in pre-seed funding.

More recently, the startup raised a $3.6 million seed round led by French edtech VC firm Educapital, with participation from Specialist VC out of Estonia and Generations Fund out of Germany, TechCrunch learned exclusively. 

As of August, the startup now claims $12 million of ARR and some 50,000 paid users, Lahoika said. With a team of 20 people, including a majority of Belarusian exiles, Vocal Image now plans to grow its development team and deploy more localizations (in addition to English, Spanish, German, French, Ukrainian and Russian).

This funding comes not long after the startup was picked by Hugging Face, Meta, and Scaleway as one of the five winners of their European AI Startup Program, but also at a time when it is facing increased competition. For instance, edtech company Headway recently added an AI-powered speech trainer to its social skills app, Skillsta. But Vocal Image can count on its own GDPR-compliant AI trove.

With some 35,000 recordings a day, Vocal Image has amassed more than 1 million real-voice samples. Even better, these recordings are labelled by the community through Voice Rating, a collaborative feature that lets users decide whether others sound “confident” or “childlike.” 

This is the kind of dataset that apps like Vocal Image sorely need in order to improve their accuracy. It could also help AI startups fine-tune their artificial voices, creating further tailwinds for the startup beyond its B2C roots.