Lingvist
Launch of a New Indigenous Languages Initiative
Elevator Pitch
Who Am I?
My name is Seth Armitage and I am the newly appointed leader for the new Lingvist Indigenous Language Initiative. I am a member of the Secwépemc Nation located in the interior of British Columbia, Canada. I am also a graduate of the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University where I majored in Business Administration and minored in Finance. From kindergarten to grade 10 I attended a Secwépemctsin (Language of the Secwépemc people) immersion school. Throughout my life I have been active in helping to preserve the Secwépemctsin language and culture. Currently I am working on updating our Secwépemctsin digital dictionary and helping teach university level Secwépemctsin courses as well as working to complete the Masters of Educational Technology program at UBC.
Who Am I Writing For?
This venture pitch was created for Assignment #3 for ETEC 522: Ventures in Learning Technology, in UBC's Masters of Educational Technology program. The purpose of this assignment is to attract investors and shareholders who see the value in preserving Indigenous languages and demonstrate that profitability can also be achieved.
What is Lingvist?
Lingvist is a language learning app that uses a scientific approach and advanced technology to help you learn a language up to 10x faster. Lingvist priortizes learning the most common words that cover 80% of what are used in every day scenarios first. Lingvist helps you learn these words in the correct context so that when you hear it spoken in real life scenarios, you are able to learn and understand the language sooner.
Lingvist was developed by Mait Müntel Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Mait Müntel is a nuclear physicist and an entrepreneur. He received his PhD in theoretical physics in 2008 from the University of Tartu in Estonia.
During his studies, he worked as a teacher of physics to secondary school students. Mait also worked at CERN within the CMS experiments division for 9 years and was part of the Higgs boson discovery team in Switzerland in 2012.
After the particle’s discovery, Mait got the idea to use the same algorithms from particle physics to help people learn new languages 10 times faster. He co-founded Lingvist, which has since grown from a great idea into an amazing team of over 30 people.