gravity About
The story behind Gravity.
A small team building the language app we wished existed when we were the ones standing in front of a sign we couldn't read.
A bit of history
We’re a 3-person team from Vancouver, Canada. We originally built software for the space industry (huge pivot, we know), but quickly realized we had no personal connection to what we were making, and breaking into the industry with no credibility in space was a challenge.
So we wiped the slate clean. What did we actually care about? Travel, music, meeting people, acquiring new experiences. We threw out a lot of ideas: travel budgeting tools, a social app designed around real-life connection. Good ideas, maybe. But none of them had the same pull.
What we kept gravitating back to (pun intended) was studying abroad in Japan. We all lived it: years of studying a language, then standing in front of a menu and still not being able to read most of it. We knew immediately that applied language learning was an unsolved problem—one we wanted to take a real shot at.
Why we built Gravity
Gravity came from a shared experience and frustration. We’d all tried the existing tools. Duolingo made us feel like progress was being made, but the gamification and the real world were two different places. Anki was more rigorous and can help drill in vocab and grammar, but the review pile had a way of snowballing the moment you missed a few days; we found that once it did, most people drowned in reviews and never came back. The gap between “doing the lessons” and “understanding the world we were standing in” stayed wide no matter how many owls or decks were involved.
Gravity started from a small observation: the sentences and words you’d actually love to remember are usually right in front of you—a subway sign, a menu, the back of your skincare bottle, a friend’s text. The textbook chose vocabulary for us. We wanted an app that let the world choose for us instead—all you need to do is capture the moment.
Who’s behind Gravity
Gravity is built by a small team at Heimdall Space, a company registered in Canada. We’re all language learners ourselves—some multilingual from birth, some still hunting for a Japanese particle that’s been hiding from us for years.
We wanted to build something we’d actually find useful ourselves. No drilling words you don’t care about, no hours spent building flashcards, no AI tutor that hallucinates vocabulary and takes ten seconds to answer. Just something you’d actually recommend to a friend.
Our honorary fourth teammate is Aio. Named after Jupiter’s moon Io, Aio is Gravity’s polyglot mascot and your quiet companion along the way, always rooting for you in the background.
What we hope Gravity becomes
For the traveler stepping off a long flight, we hope Gravity is the thing that turns the next few weeks of menus, signs, and overheard sentences into a vocabulary that stays.
For the immigrant, the expat, the partner of a native speaker, the student abroad—we hope it becomes a quiet companion that makes the messy reality of acquiring a language feel less like work and more like collecting. A constellation of words you’ve actually lived with.
And longer term, we hope it’s the kind of tool that fades into the background—present every day, never asking for your attention, just gently making the world you’re already in a little more legible.
Get in touch
Questions, feedback, or just want to say hello? We read every email at hello@learngravity.com.
