Jakso's family has deep roots in Kerala, but he grew up with his parents in Jamshedpur. Because of this, Jakso grew up speaking Hindi fluently, but he could never speak Malayalam - even though he could understand the language. This became a problem every time he went back to Kerala to visit his family. Later on, he faced a similar issue when he went to Kolkata for his internship in 2021. One day, he opened the Duolingo app with the hope of learning both Malayalam and Bengali. But to his surprise, he couldn’t find either of these languages on Duolingo. In fact, he couldn’t find any Indian languages on most popular language-learning apps apart from Hindi—despite the fact that Bengali, for example, is the fifth most spoken language in the world.

So Jakso tried a different approach by using Indian language-learning apps. But these apps, in his opinion, had another problem: they were poorly designed, and the content simply wasn’t engaging enough to learn from.

It was at this point that he realized the Indian language-learning ecosystem was broken.

By 2022, he had started researching language-learning techniques, and in August 2023, he began building PortalLearn, with a focus on Indian languages. They very recently launched their app in March 2024, and in the very first month, they already had 63 users. By the next month, that number had jumped to 250.

While the app is completely free for users right now, Jaxo is planning to launch paid subscription plans in the future once he has enough users on the platform. While PortalLearn is still very much in scrappy startup mode and figuring out its monetization…

The next company on this list has already figured that part out.