In the grand, echoing gallery of modern capital, where the paintings are all hockey-stick graphs and the statues are carved from the hollowed-out promises of the gig economy, we have been gifted a new idol to worship. Preply, the language-learning marketplace, has ascended to the status of a 'unicorn'—that mythological designation we bestow upon companies that have successfully convinced a consortium of bored billionaires that they can eventually monopolize a fundamental human instinct. In this case, that instinct is the desire to speak to one another, a pursuit that apparently requires $150 million in fresh Series D funding and a valuation of $1.2 billion to facilitate. How charmingly late-stage of us.

The narrative being served alongside this financial feast is one of 'Ukrainian resilience.' It is a phrase that, in any sane world, would evoke the grim determination of a people defending their soil against the barbaric encroachment of an imperialist neighbor. But in the sanitized, air-conditioned theater of venture capital, 'resilience' has been repurposed as a compelling brand narrative. We are invited to marvel at the fact that a fourteen-year-old company—an adolescent in the tech world that refuses to move out of the VC basement—can continue to match students with tutors while the geopolitical map of its founding home is being redrawn in blood. It is a peculiar kind of alchemy, transforming the grit of survival into the grease of a pitch deck.

Let us deconstruct the absurdity of the 'language marketplace' itself. In the old world, the one I occasionally remember with a sigh of relief, learning a language was a romantic or intellectual endeavor. One studied French to read Proust or Italian to argue with a waiter in Tuscany. Today, language is merely another commodity to be traded on a digital exchange. Preply does not sell culture; it sells the ability to navigate a B2B PowerPoint presentation in a second tongue. It is the commodification of the Tower of Babel, where the confusion of tongues is not a divine curse, but a scalable revenue model. The platform sits as a middleman, taking its pound of flesh from every irregular verb and whispered conjugation, all while masquerading as a beacon of global connectivity.

There is a surgical irony in the fact that this 'unicorn' status comes after fourteen years of existence. In the tech industry, if you haven’t pivoted or imploded within half a decade, you are usually considered a relic. Yet, Preply has lingered, a testament to the sheer persistence of the middleman. The $150 million infusion is not a vote of confidence in a revolutionary new technology—let’s be honest, video calling and calendar scheduling are hardly the stuff of Da Vinci—but rather a testament to the surplus of capital currently floating around the global North with nowhere better to go. With the world seemingly teetering on the edge of several different varieties of apocalypse, the wise men of finance have decided that the safest bet is an app that helps people ask where the bathroom is in German.

One must also admire the geographical schizophrenia of the modern corporation. Founded in Kyiv, headquartered in Brookline, and boasting offices in Barcelona, Preply is the ultimate nomad. It is a company from everywhere and nowhere, a digital ghost that haunts the cloud. This borderless existence is presented as a strength, yet it stands in stark contrast to the very real, very bloody struggle for borders that defines the Ukrainian experience today. The 'resilience' being celebrated here is the ability of capital to decouple itself from the messy reality of the ground. While the people of Ukraine fight for their land, their most successful export is a platform that allows people to escape their own linguistic boundaries from the comfort of a suburban home office.

As an exasperated observer of this tragicomic theater, I find a particular joy in the bureaucratic theater of it all. We are told this marks a 'new chapter' for the company. In the language of corporate hagiography, a 'new chapter' usually means more aggressive marketing, more layers of management, and a slightly more expensive espresso machine in the breakroom. It is the triumph of the mundane over the magnificent. We are meant to cheer for the $1.2 billion valuation as if it were a victory on the battlefield, forgetting that a valuation is merely a collective hallucination agreed upon by people in expensive suits.

Ultimately, the story of Preply is the story of our era: the repackaging of human tragedy and triumph into a digestible, investable format. We have taken the profound, agonizing resilience of a nation and used it to justify the valuation of a tutoring app. It is sophisticated, it is efficient, and it is utterly, devastatingly cynical. I told you so, of course, but in this world, being right is a small consolation when the alternative is so profitable.