The company that now sells language lessons to millions was first registered under a name almost nobody remembers: Lesson Nine GmbH. Four men who had worked together at a Berlin software firm, Markus Witte, Lorenz Heine, Thomas Holl and Toine Diepstraten, founded it in August 2007, and for a while the name said all there was to say. A lesson, and a number.
They did not start with a plan to build a giant. They started with a website. In January 2008 it opened as a free community beta, a place where people could learn a language online in plain, practical steps. Free is a comfortable word for a founder. It brings users quickly and demands nothing back.
These were modest, local cheques, not the glamour money of later years.
The decision that mattered came next, and it was a less comfortable one. The founders chose paid content over advertising and over a long free tier. It meant fewer sign-ups and harder conversations. It also meant that every user who stayed was a customer, not a number to sell to advertisers.
What almost nobody remembers is how small the early backing was. A case study from the University of British Columbia names Kizoo Technology Ventures and the Berlin state-linked IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft as the first investors in 2008. These were modest, local cheques, not the glamour money of later years. Later, a round of about $22m led by Scottish Equity Partners, with Reed Elsevier Ventures and Nokia Growth Partners alongside, gave the company room to grow abroad. In 2013 it bought PlaySay, a San Francisco startup, to get a foothold in the United States.
Growth brought its own tensions. In 2020 staff in the Berlin office elected a works council. In 2022 the company gave free access codes to Ukrainian refugees, a gesture that suited a firm built on helping people speak to each other. By 2022 revenue stood at about €247m with roughly 1,000 employees.
Then came the part founders rarely plan for. Witte, who had run the company as CEO, stepped down in 2019 and Arne Schepker took over. In October 2024 Witte came back as CEO. By mid-2025 Tim Allen held the job and Witte moved to chair the supervisory board. A founder had left, returned, and then stepped up to the sidelines within six years.
There is a quiet lesson in the name Lesson Nine. The founders began with something plain and almost forgettable, and let the product, not the branding, earn the right to a bigger name. The decision to charge from day one looks obvious in hindsight. In 2008 it was the whole company.