A group of friendly animals teaches kids to count and recite the alphabet through a series of games, before moving on to lessons about life skills like hygiene and problem-solving. When they’re finished, the kids are invited to help Blippi clean up after his return from a dinosaur excavation.

No, this isn’t a dream elementary school— it’s the experience kids can have these days in the Lingokids learning app.

This 10-year-old platform offers a mix of educational games and entertainment content in an ad-free format with free and subscription tiers. Aimed at two- to eight- year-olds, Lingokids encompasses more than 3,000 educational activities—including games, videos and songs—that teach literacy, STEAM and social skills.

Since launching in 2015, the app has racked up more than 168 million downloads and raised around US$65 million in capital from investors including HV Capital and puzzle-maker Ravensburger.

Now, the Madrid-based company behind Lingokids is on a new mission to expand its business model by bringing third-party brands into the app, rather than relying solely on its own characters to engage young users. And it’s also moving into creating original long-form animated series.

Learning and growing
Founder and CEO Cristobal Viedma launched the app in 2015 to fill a need for educational learning platforms that go beyond basic literacy and numeracy to also teach physical and emotional well-being. Usage grew steadily but modestly until the pandemic, when the company saw a huge surge in demand.

But once lockdowns were over and kids were back in school, Lingokids needed to evolve, so it added a freemium model in 2023 that gives kids limited access to a select number of games. (Paid subscribers can access the full game catalogue.)

The Lingokids app teaches kids literacy, STEAM and social skills

This approach has helped the app grow to a million daily active users, says Viedma, adding that its top markets are the US, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, Australia and Singapore. The company’s next growth strategy is all about bringing third-party brands into the mix. Pointing to the need for this, Lingokids looked at internal data to see what kids were searching for in the app—and Moonbug Entertainment’s Blippi was in the top 10.

The team then turned to parents with a simple question. “We asked, ‘If we had different characters, who would [your] kids want to see?’ And Blippi was again in the top 10,” says director of content strategy Vladimir Klimov. “So we approached Moonbug with this data showing the demand among kids and parents.”

Fast-forward to December 2024, when Lingokids launched 15 exclusive games with Moonbug. They’re all versions of the app’s existing learning games, such as drawing and matching, but refl avored with Blippi assets.

Lingokids can either work closely with brand owners on the content’s look in the app, or do more of that work if an IP owner prefers to delegate, says Klimov. In the case of Blippi, the company worked with Moonbug to polish the look of the character in 2D animation, and then produced all of the Blippi content in-house.

From concept to release, the entire process took just three months—likely the fastest track to making high-quality art and games to satisfy this audience, says Klimov. Brand partnerships are a monetization opportunity, too. Lingokids is pretty flexible on the shape of its deals with IP owners, which could take the form of fixed fees or a revenue-sharing model, depending on what the partner is interested in, says Viedma. And discoverability isn’t a problem, because the app can highlight brands with individual sections so users can easily find the new content.

Lingokids and Moonbug teamed up on 15 exclusive games that update the app’s existing ones with Blippi characters

Since launching four months ago, Lingokids’ Blippi games have been played more than 100 million times and are now hitting a million plays per day, notes Klimov, adding that this level of reach is hard to achieve anywhere else, even on Roblox.

In one striking example, Moonbug’s Find the Blippis game on Roblox has generated 14 million visits since its October release, says Viedma. “We did four times that in two months on Lingokids.” The app can also cross-promote physical merchandise by creating notifications that appear when kids finish a lesson, nudging them to continue learning outside the app using a brand’s real-life toys and products.

Based on the success of its Blippi suite of games, Lingokids is in the process of approaching other companies that own educational IPs aimed at the app’s target audience of two- to eight-year-olds. “More brands are coming,” says Viedma. “If you want exposure to this audience, we are the perfect place to be.”

Talking the animation talk
While focusing on building its own brand and platform has allowed the company to grow at an impressive pace, there are downsides to this approach. For instance, Lingokids has heard from parents that their kids don’t know its characters as well as those from TV or YouTube, says Klimov.

To try and change that, the company has been working to build up its popularity on YouTube—its Lingokids Songs and Playlearning channel currently has 2.8 million subscribers.

Now, the natural next step is to push into long-form animation in order to re-use series assets and generate longer-term value for the company’s content, says Viedma.

Lingokids has tapped former CAKE CEO and creative director Tom van Waveren as an executive producer to help navigate this move. Van Waveren took the 2D-animated preschool series Cowy & B (formerly titled Lingokids Adventures with Baby Bot) to Cartoon Forum in 2023, and it’s now in development with character designs from creator Guillermo García-Carsí. In each episode, these characters help a robot understand emotions and other human realities. Lingokids is fully funding the 52 x 11-minute series and will launch it on both the app and YouTube when it’s completed.

Van Waveren and Lingokids are also producing the short-form series Baby Bot’s Backyard Tales (pictured at the top), which targets kids ages four to seven. This concept focuses on a calf and a baby robot who have fun in silly situations while learning life lessons about sharing and regulating emotions. Like Cowy & B, the show’s 2.5-minute episodes will roll out on YouTube and the Lingokids app.

Van Waveren also connected Lingokids with Bianca Rodriguez, the former head of sales at CAKE, who is now distributing the app’s catalogue of more than 30 hours of content in formats ranging from original songs and nursery rhymes, to hybrid live-action/animated videos that feature real actors alongside the animated characters.

“In a world where the market is asking for brands, we can demonstrate our personal relationship with millions of preschoolers and their caregivers around the world,” says van Waveren.

This story originally appeared in Kidscreen‘s Q2 2025 magazine issue.