An investigative journalist in Nashville, USA, and a language teacher, Michelle Glorieux launched Ta-Da! in 2018. Following Ilana Devillers with Food4All in 2019, Nicolas Legay and Aurélien Dobbels with Cocoonut last year, her start-up has won the third edition of Start-up Stories organised by Paperjam.

Michelle, let's start at the beginning: what does your start-up do?

Michelle Glorieux. - We develop intelligent books, books and recently dictionaries, but also other media, thanks to which very young children can learn language through sound. They touch the book, which makes a sound, and it trains them.

We see a lot of you on social networks, but not much at events or competitions. Are you focused on development?

I don't have the time. That's the life of entrepreneurs in the start-up world. On November 2 we started our campaign on Kickstarter, ed.) And we want to raise €2m. In fact, the ministry of the economy will give us a grant of €1m if we raise €1m on our own. This is for a special project that we are just starting to work on.

What is this project? Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

We are working on artificial intelligence and voice recognition. We already have prototypes that work very well.

What will this do for your 1,000-word audio dictionaries, which have been created in 23 different voices?

It will provide another way to access the joy of engaging with language and culture without a screen. And what excites us even more is the possibility of having a much more advanced reporting tool for learning. Take the dictionary, for example. It will allow you to send a report at night to the teacher to tell him what the child has mastered really well or not, to really customise, personalise the learning experience. That's why we didn't participate in many events. We had a very busy year, with many successes.

The "touchless" book has a specificity...

Yes, there are no products on the market to teach language to children under 5 years of age, which is when children are most receptive to learning languages. Not to mention that being too 'glued' to screens at this age is not good for your health.

For those who have not followed this fantastic year, could you summarise the main points?

It doesn't fit on two slides! But let's go! We recruited an operational director in Luxembourg, Del Lloyd, a technical director in Silicon Valley, Alex Freed, and a chief revenue officer in New York, Tim McCall, and students from the University of Luxembourg. We raised €400,000 from nine investors to print our first six titles, which we took to market in April. Since then, we have sold 11,000 copies without any marketing effort.

The effect of this incredible agreement with the Barnes & Noble chain in the United States?

Yes, it's 700 bookstores all over the United States, the biggest bookstore network. But we've also been able to sell our books at Ernster, the Pall Center, Sichel Home, Bicherhaischen Bookstore, Holzhaischen Toy Store, local drugstores, the Du Tiers and Du Quart bookstore - and soon at Abitare Kids.

We have also expanded our range of books for 6 to 11 year olds. Ten more will be ready soon. These books are available in French, German, Spanish, English (for the US), Mandarin, and we have our first book in Luxembourgish waiting to be printed. We have also developed 18 ebooks for Apple. One of our books entered the Amazon bestseller list in the US for the first time at number 16, again without marketing.

What else do you have in the pipeline, as they say, apart from the first book in Luxembourgish?

We are in discussions with the American school system in Tampa, Florida, to integrate our series 'The Language Adventures', which they discovered at Barnes & Noble. The first English-language talking dictionary, developed by Harvard linguist Jesse Lewis, who won four Grammy Awards for Yo-Yo Ma, is due to be released soon. We are a few weeks away from finalising both the German speaking dictionary with the German International School in Silicon Valley and the Spanish speaking dictionary with the Autonomous University of Mexico and three-time Latin Grammy Award winner Andres Landinez.

Another amusing fact: at a time when Luxembourg is completing its plan to develop space start-ups and, in general, the space economy, you too have a 'space' project in the field of education with interactive audio books...

Yes. Let's say we are interested in space as a subject. We've just finished the fourth title in the Language Adventures, Space series, with the same award-winning team. Last week we teamed up with Brian May, the Queen guitarist and astrophysicist, to ensure the educational richness of this very relevant subject and also to bring the vocabulary of space in a variety of different languages to children from 0 to 5+, all over the world. Nasa astronaut Nicole Stott has agreed to be the guest star of the English version of Space. We will also be working on interactive exhibitions for World Asteroid Day in two museums, one in Silicon Valley and one in Luxembourg. We will also be present with the Asteroid Foundation on this day, which traditionally takes place in June.

Since the beginning - and this is probably a good approach because the Luxembourg market is small by nature - you claim to be a global company... without giving up your attachment to Luxembourg, right?

Yes, this year, as we have seen, we have developed our relationship with the United States, at different levels. Everyone is very invested in the project. But Luxembourg is definitely still 'the place to be'. We are looking at how to organise an event with a casting of local children's voices, which will be in the French and Luxembourgish voice dictionary. Anyone who says a word correctly into the microphone will be included in the final version. Of course, Covid requires us to make this safe. We have also already established partnerships, in Luxembourg, to launch a pre-school programme on tactile paper around phonetics, young readers and displays for the classroom. It's amazing that this doesn't exist. With my team, we want to bring all this to the education systems.

All very impressive…and on the right track.

We don't have a problem. We have no problems, only good things to contribute. Well, our only concern is that we need money. A lot of money, because we are a global player. Today, we have a lot of interest in our technology from many, many countries, and we are obliged to refuse, to say 'no', to remain focused on raising €1m, so as to receive another million euros from the Luxinnovation grant.

€1m is not that much at the moment with your developments, both in terms of sales and partnerships or projects, is it?

But when I talk about it with my lawyer and my contacts in Silicon Valley, they say: 'Oh, it's nothing, let's talk about it!’ Luxembourg is my community. This is where I got all the support I needed. We have to move on. If we don't, someone else will. When you look at the evolution of educational technology, you see how fast it is going! Confinemant has shown the impact of technology on learning, but we need more technology. Every day I attend seminars where people say they need solutions. And every day I say I have those solutions.

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.