From Shanghai to Canterbury: why I moved to the UK to build an AI education platform

In 2023, I left a stable product role at a Shanghai EdTech company and moved to Canterbury, England. People thought I was mad. Two years later, Readii has 239 books in its library, a live subscription platform, and users in both countries. This is why I did it — and what I've learned.

The problem I couldn't stop thinking about

I spent years in EdTech in China. At UMU, an enterprise learning platform with over 70 million users across 200 countries, I worked on how technology could make learning more effective at scale. At ChinaHR, one of China's largest recruitment platforms, I learned how important communication is to career outcomes.

Across both roles, I kept encountering the same underlying problem: Chinese professionals and children who were technically competent in English — who had studied for years, passed exams, even worked in international environments — but who struggled when it came to spoken communication in British contexts. Not because they lacked intelligence or vocabulary. Because they had never had access to consistent, high-quality exposure to how British English actually sounds.

The best English teachers in China are scarce and expensive. Most parents — even highly educated ones — cannot model British pronunciation for their children, because they themselves were taught by Chinese teachers with Chinese accents. The gap reproduces itself, generation after generation.

Why Canterbury

When I decided to build Readii as a UK company, Canterbury was a deliberate choice. It is a historic city with a strong sense of place, close enough to London to access its networks, but grounded enough to build something real. The University of Kent, the cathedral, the proximity to Europe — Canterbury has always been a place where cultures meet.

Readii Limited was incorporated here in July 2023. It remains here. So do I.

What I thought I was building — and what it became

The original Readii model was built around British teachers. We recruited native speakers, recorded them reading through a graded British reader series, and built a programme where children could listen daily and develop their ear for authentic British English. It worked. The early results were clear: children who engaged with the programme consistently showed measurable improvement in pronunciation and confidence within weeks.

But as I was building, something was changing in the technology landscape. AI voice analysis — the ability to assess pronunciation at a phoneme level, in real time, without a human teacher — was becoming genuinely usable. What had required a qualified teacher to identify and correct was now something a well-trained model could do at scale, instantly, for any learner anywhere.

This changed what Readii could be. Instead of a programme dependent on teacher availability and cost, we could build a platform: one where the content is delivered by recorded native speakers, and the feedback is delivered by AI. Scalable, affordable, available to any child with an internet connection.

That pivot — from teacher-dependent service to AI-powered platform — is the core of what Readii is now. And it happened because we were paying attention to what the technology was becoming, not just executing on the original plan.

What I've learned

Building a company in the UK as a Chinese founder is harder than I expected in some ways, and easier in others.

The regulatory environment is clear and predictable. The business culture rewards consistency and reliability. There is genuine appetite — from families, from schools, from businesses — for what we're building. The UK's openness to international founders, and the specific framework of the Innovator Founder visa, made it possible for someone like me to come here and build something real.

The hard part is universal: doing the work every day, without knowing exactly when it will compound. There are months when the progress feels invisible. Then something shifts — a user writes to say their child's teacher noticed a difference, or a business client closes a deal they'd been struggling with — and you remember why the work matters.

Two years in, with 239 books in the library, a live subscription platform, and users in the UK and China, I can see it compounding.

What's next

Readii's next phase is about scale. The platform works. The content is there. The AI assessment is live. What we're building now is the infrastructure to serve not dozens of families but thousands — and to expand from children's English education into the broader challenge of cross-border communication for UK-China businesses.

If you're a Chinese family thinking about the UK, or a British business thinking about China — we built Readii for both of you.