We recently announced that our teaching platform is being rebranded as “Engoo.” Since many of you have said that you’d like to see more company updates on the blog, let’s explore this recent change together.

Bibo (since 2013)

When we started out seven years ago, we hired exclusively in the Philippines. The Philippines was the perfect place to start not only because of its huge pool of talented English speakers, but also because it’s home to some of the friendliest people in the world — an important trait if you want to be an online tutor.

So we chose a name that reflected the sort of tutors we were looking for: bibo, meaning “lively” or “enthusiastic” in Filipino.

We started out with 119 local tutors in some humble offices in Cebu, Manila, and Davao, then gradually expanded recruitment to the rest of the country. Since then, we’ve worked with thousands of talented tutors across the Philippines, and we’re happy to say that our Filipino tutors and Tutor Support staff form a core part of our community to this day.

We’re even happier to say that we’ve expanded way beyond the Philippines. Since launching international recruitment, we’ve established a steady presence in Europe, Africa, and many native English-speaking countries. Our tutoring community now spreads across six continents and more than 70 countries.

In 2015, we also started expanding our tutoring service to countries outside Japan under the brand “Engoo”: first Taiwan, then South Korea, next Thailand, and then a handful of countries in Europe and Latin America.

In other words, we’ve come a long way from just Japan and the Philippines, and it’s time that our brand reflected this.

Engoo (2020 and on)

Since we were already using Engoo to brand ourselves in our global markets, it only seemed natural to bring the tutoring arm of our company under this brand as well.

So while we’ll miss the Tagalog word for “enthusiastic,” we’re now moving on to Engoo, which better reflects our global presence and also our core service: teaching English.

👋 That’s it for now!

We hope you enjoyed learning how we’ve grown from Bibo into Engoo.

We’d also like to reassure tutors that the changes will have minimal effects on your day-to-day tutoring. Logos will be switched and new design improvements will be released in the coming months, but other than that, we are still the same team and the same company.

Happy tutoring!