Cleverbots

Cleverbots automated up to 60% of support tickets before LLMs existed. Three school friends founded Cleverbots in 2017 to automate customer and HR support for large international companies, sometimes handling up to 60% of tickets.

The idea was inspired by the chatbot API Pavel Durov launched for Telegram. At the time the technology was called natural language processing (NLP), and the founders believed chatbots would become the main way people interact with machines.

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Building hundreds of chatbots made the team experts in conversation design. Years of shipping chatbots taught the founders what users expect from a reply and the exact moments they quit a conversation, which made them opinionated about what to build next.

The timing worked against them: customers expected any chatbot to behave like the weak ones they already knew, and the market was chasing Web3 instead. Being early is what taught the team to build with these tools.

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The pivot to Praktika followed the founders' own pain, not market size. The founders saw the same conversational AI could break the English barrier they had faced themselves, started the idea in 2021 on the earliest GPT API, and launched Praktika publicly in 2024. Praktika has since reached $50M ARR with about 40 people and more than 30 million learners.

Adam Turaev, a non-native English speaker, calls English an income and opportunity multiplier. He saw dissatisfaction with existing solutions and no one using conversational AI to fix it, and says they did not expect the market to be this big.

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