Nick Lahoika

About

Nick Lahoika is the co-founder and CEO of Vocal Image, a soft skills AI coaching startup. The company has more than 4 million downloads and 50,000 subscribers worldwide. His journey is deeply personal; he was bullied for unclear diction at school, which inspired his mission to help people communicate better. After being forced to flee his home country following the 2020 revolution, Lahoika arrived in Estonia with minimal command of English and used his own app to train his voice, securing his first round of funding within just six months. The winner of the AWS AI Challenge and Meta x Hugging Face European AI Startup Program, Vocal Image recently raised a $3.6 million seed round led by Educapital (France) and scaled to more than $14 million ARR. ## Related reading: [...] Unicorn Board Tech Layoffs Tracker Billion-Dollar Exits Largest Funding Deals Tracker Web3 Tracker Venture funding reports + Q1 2023 - Q1 2023 Global - Q1 2023 North America - Q1 2023 Europe - Q1 2023 Latin America - Q1 2023 Asia + 2022 - 2022 Global - 2022 North America - 2022 Europe - 2022 Latin America - 2022 Asia Diversity • Seed funding • Startups • Venture # How To Raise Capital When You Don’t Sound Like An Insider Guest Author November 19, 2025 Guest Author 4 Shares Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn By Nick Lahoika The first question investors asked me in my early months of pitching was, “Where are you from?” The accent gave me away every tim