Our Story

It all started in 2023. Our Co-Founder and Product Lead was in Portugal celebrating her 28th birthday, her fifth European country in two years. She noticed something that stayed with her: most people she met were navigating two or three languages a week with ease. Inspired to become a polyglot herself, she chose Spanish. It was the natural choice for her back home in America.

Early in her journey, she discovered Dreaming Spanish and the power of Comprehensible Input (CI). From that moment, she was sold. To stay motivated, she began scheduling trips across the Spanish-speaking world—navigating transportation, ordering meals, and chatting with locals in Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Spain. The ultimate win came in Costa Rica, when a tour driver called her his personal translator.

Throughout this journey, she remained remarkably consistent, meticulously logging every hour in a spreadsheet to forecast when she would hit the esteemed 1,500 hour milestone. She eventually surpassed that goal and has now amassed over 1,700 hours of input. She then developed an itch to learn a new language again, so she started learning French, and a second detailed spreadsheet was born.

Watching his wife manually manage formulas and logs across multiple languages, our Co-Founder and CTO saw an opportunity to build a better home for this data. He envisioned a space where she could track, forecast, and visualize her progress without the friction of manual spreadsheet maintenance.

Inspired by her sister, the new Head of Outreach joined the team to focus on grassroots engagement, building a direct bridge to student communities to understand their core challenges.

That's when Polyo was born. We've built the app we always wanted: a place to track progress across multiple languages, forecast your milestones, and truly visualize your journey toward fluency.

Thank you for letting us be your home for language learning.