At Fluent City, even a simple appetizer comes with a side of culinary history.
“This is a 1400-year-old recipe,” Antoine Amira, who is from Lyon, France, said as he served up a slice of Brie cheese at the startup’s launch party last month.
He went on to explain how Brie sealed up its reputation as the “prince of cheese” from the moment Charlemagne first encountered it around the year 700.
Amira is one of several consultants for Fluent City’s new slate of courses. Sure, you might know how to hold a conversation in French, but can you pass for a local in Paris? Or whip up a round of martinis for friends while hanging out in your apartment? And is said apartment decorated to impress or is it outfitted with generic furnishings from Ikea?
Because Fluent City wants to help. Until now, the Williamsburg-based company, founded in 2011, has focused on language instruction in but it’s now extending that approach to topics such as interior design, cocktail making and globetrotting.
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Along with the new slate of courses, Fluent City announced a $2.5 million round of funding. Lerner Investments led the round (that’s a fund from Ted Lerner, the D.C.-area real estate developer who owns the Washington Nationals and whose real estate company developed Chelsea Piers) and San Mateo, Calif.-based edtech investment firm Learn Capital, Westport, Conn.-based New Ground Ventures and D.C.’s 1776 Ventures also participated. Individual entrepreneurs chipped in as well, including General Assembly cofounders Brad Hargreaves (who now runs coliving startup Common) and Matt Brimer.

STEM’s not the only kind of education

Hargreaves and Brimer (who was amused at being part of what we called “Brooklyn’s tech illuminati”) were among the small crowd that showed up at the company’s relaunch party last month in the East Village. Both expressed high praise for Fluent City’s CEO, James Rohrbach, particularly his idea of applying language instruction to the broader concept of cultural literacy.
Plus, Hargreaves added, “It’s a good Brooklyn story.”
At the very least, it’s good for job seekers in Brooklyn, as the company is steadily hiring. Fluent City started the year with just eight employees. Now it has more than 20. Technical.ly met quite a few of those recent recruits at the launch party, including Justin Kohn, the company’s director of operations and finance, and retention marketing manager Beth Greenaway, who had just started her job that week. Other employees, such as Lauren Abuouf, who works in customer service and operations, joined the company after taking one of its classes.

Another one of Hargreaves’s remarks, on cultural literacy, turned out to be theme of the evening. Introducing himself to the room, Rohrbach attempted to answer this question: what the heck does interior design have to do with learning to speak French?
“As I thought about how we could expand to something bigger and greater,” he said, “I asked myself, ‘What does it mean to be a well-rounded human today?'”
That notion of well-roundedness has been on Rohrbach’s mind a lot lately, he told Technical.ly. Rohrbach has spent much of his career in education technology, having previously worked at 2U and Noodle, whose cofounders are also among Fluent City’s investors. So he recognizes the demand for STEM knowledge as much as anyone. But he’s concerned that other areas might be getting lost in the shuffle.
“I was an English literature major in college, and I’ve always been passionate about art and culture,” he said. “My goal is to reinvigorate the liberal arts — I want that on my tombstone.”

“Down to earth” classes, high-profile teachers

Fluent City’s new classes, like its language courses, are designed to pack in lots of practical knowledge within a short timeframe. Each class, which costs $400, includes four two-hour sessions that meet once a week. The company will also debut one-time courses and special events throughout the year, including a session on street art. The cost for those courses will vary, Rohrbach told Technical.ly, depending upon length.
One way Fluent City seeks to shake up its industry is by taking a laid-back approach, with as much emphasis on enjoyment as instruction, said Becky Goodman, the company’s director of programs and partnerships. Goodman, who joined Fluent City this spring, has a background in hospitality, having previously worked at the NoMad Hotel, and she aims to bring similar high-touch service to Fluent City’s classes.
“It’s all about being accessible, fun, and down to earth,” she says. “I thought I was going to be a professor at one point, and this is a fun way to reincorporate education into my life.”

As I thought about how we could expand to something bigger and greater, I asked myself, 'What does it mean to be a well-rounded human today?'

Just as Fluent City hires native speakers for its language classes, it has tapped active practitioners to design and teach its new cultural classes. Kat VanCleave, an art director who has worked with Stella McCartney and the Royal Family of Bhutan, developed Fluent City’s interior design curriculum. Mixologists Rachel Kim of Roof at Park South in Manhattan and Robby Nelson of Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens are leading the cocktail-making class. Serving up daiquiris, they gave a quick lesson on the master ratios for shaken and stirred drinks.
“You should feel comfortable ordering drinks at the bar and making drinks with friends,” Kim said.
Another area where Fluent City is planning to expand: designing its own educational products. One goal of the company is to send its students home with something tangible at the end of each course, said Rikard Björkdahl, the company’s creative director. Fluent City’s interior design students, for instance, will receive a scrapbook to document their style ideas, while cocktail-making students will get a placemat that includes a guide to the master ratios for mixing drinks.
Fluent City also writes its own books for its language instruction courses, and Rohrbach told Technical.ly the company is considering selling them to the general public in the future. On the face of it, that sounds pretty standard for an education company: textbooks are par for the course. But very few, we’d wager, feature tips on how to flirt on Tinder in Spanish.
In Fluent City’s view, it’s all about breaking down the walls of traditional instruction.

“It’s not about learning what’s right,” Rohrbach said. “It’s about gaining confidence in real situations so you can connect more deeply with the people around you.”