Language learners and older adults needed the same thing: conversations. That’s how Senior Lingua was born - Alejo Santolino Simón, CEO & Founder Senior Lingua

Senior Lingua is a Spanish startup founded by Alejo Santolino Simón, that connects seniors with language students in an effort to fight loneliness and strengthen inter-generational relations. 

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Alejo came with the idea after teaching Spanish for 15 years and seeing how students struggled to find opportunities to practice, especially with native speakers. He studied business administration and worked as an export manager, among many other roles, which helped him make sure the product is “engaging, adapted to users needs and accessible for all user levels”. 

Besides wanting to connect elders and students, he also had a personal motivation to launch this startup:

“On the other hand, I witnessed my father gradually isolating himself due to Alzheimer's. And one night, I had the idea, I realized that the two groups—language learners and older adults—needed the same thing: conversations. That’s how Senior Lingua was born.”

Senior Lingua is currently in its early stage, but has ambitious growth and expansion plans. They have a passionate team that manages UX/UI design, tech development and marketing:
“We're lean, but everyone brings expertise in education, social innovation, or digital inclusion.”

They have run a pilot with Alejo’s Spanish students and seniors from an Alzheimer’s association to gather feedback and until now, it looks like the app is really adding important value: 

“The feedback was overwhelmingly positive: students appreciated having real conversations instead of just exercises, and older adults said they felt useful, connected, and energized. 

Nevertheless their input helped us improve the interface and some features, which led us to the app we are launching now.”

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Developing a language app for both students and seniors brings challenges, especially as it has to be tech-friendly with both groups:

 “It’s a challenge—especially the first steps. 

We don't think seniors don't like technology as many seniors are familiar with video call apps, Facebook or Whatsapp. But beside the problem of arriving at the target, Senior Lingua is something new and there is understandable mistrust, although we implemented several safety measures and designed Senior Lingua to be as simple and accessible as possible. 

In the trials, once they try it, most seniors are surprised by how easy—and enjoyable—it is.”

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Senior Lingua has started with Spanish lessons, especially as this is the market Alejo and his team knows best, but they have strong internationalization plans:

“The opportunity is huge—millions of learners and a growing elderly population globally.

There are many challenges on the marketing side, but I think that the main one is building trust and we put a lot of effort designing the app and managing it to avoid problems. 

Why I chose trust, because with trust, we expect we can scale through partnerships with educational institutions, NGOs, and public entities in each target country.”

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There’s an entire roadmap for the app to grow and reach its potential as envisioned by Alejo. Next steps include developing more AI-based features, for example to give feedback to students and expand to other languages. 

“But now, we need collaborations with senior institutions, Spanish ones or from other languages that can provide us the seniors to grow in Spanish and launch the service in other languages. 

In fact, the app is also ready in English, but we need the support and collaboration of entities working with seniors to provide the service, at least at first stage.

And yes, we are looking for investment, but we know that we need to have traction to obtain it.”

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Thank you, Alejo Santolino Simón!

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