Mikael Journo Chief Marketing Officer, Lingokids

Company

Lingokids helps millions of families around the world raise amazing kids through playlearning™. Their vision is to create an iconic brand for early childhood education and stressless parenting. Founded in 2015 by Cristobal Viedma, Lingokids launched their first app in early 2016 and reached 1M users after a year. In early 2019 the Lingocharacters were given a new look and the whole of Lingokids was rebranded in December 2019 to encourage whole families to playlearn together. They also launched the Lingokids Community to help grown-ups around the world connect about their parenting journeys together. There are now over 30M families using the Lingokids product.

Search Background

Lingokids raised a Series B in October 2020 and a $40m Series C in June 2021 led by an undisclosed investor, with participation from GP Bullhound and existing investors HV Capital and toy company Ravensburger, among others. With this growth they needed an exceptional leader to manage, nurture and lead their growing marketing team. This person would set the vision and roadmap for all growth in the company and help them reach 100M families by the end of 2022.

Requirements

The successful candidate needed to be an experienced marketing leader combining marketing and growth at scale with the ability to operate in a fast-growing, hands-on venture-backed business. This person would need to be particularly strong on CRM, Growth Marketing and Content Marketing, whilst also being able to lead the Brand & Communications strategy. An excitement for the sector and a heavy mobile-first approach was required.

Result

Erevena identified and introduced Mikael Journo to Lingokids. Mikael brings over two decades of experience and led a significant part of marketing (CRM, Player Community, Customer Care Ops and Social Media) for one of the stand-out success of consumer mobile in Europe – King.com. He was there from 2013 through to 2019 before taking on the COO role at Housfy.