Sonia Gil

Sonia Gil (born 24 September 1981) is an entrepreneur and travel vlogger. She's cofounder of digital language learning Fluenz, where she leads the creation of all learning content. She is host and co-creator of Sonia's Travels, which airs weekly on YouTube and Yahoo Screen. She also stars in the Ulive travel series Almost Free. She is the winner of the 2012 People's Voice Webby Award for Best Web Personality and the 2014 People's Voice Webby Award for Best "DIY-How to" online show for her How to Travel series. She was named the 4th most influential person in travel social media by travel blog Skift in May 2014.

Sonia Gil was born in Venezuela, in a multilingual family, grew up in Caracas and Boca Raton, Florida, and attended Cornell University where she studied plant genetics.

During the first few years of college, Gil worked on an Internet start-up. The portal loquesea.com was online from 1997 to 2002 and it was widely known as a very early social network for young people. The company "became the largest network of sites for youths in Latin America", and at some point had "19 sites running in 4 languages".

After graduating, Gil went to the Amazon rainforest and worked with an NGO. Then she went to Paris and brushed up on her French. After that, she traveled to China, where she encountered obstacles in the traditional way of learning the language. Gil’s next stop was again China, and once more she came back to the realization: Language couldn’t be taught the same way all over the world. There needed to be a common ground between traditional instruction and modern presentation. According to Joshua Cohen, Sonia started the vlog "Sonia's Travels" after she began traveling extensively for her work with Fluenz, which "make the costs of producing Sonia’s Travels marginal instead of prohibitive". She partnered with Mariana Hellmund, who is an award winning filmmaker with an extensive career, and together they developed the visual style that characterizes the web series.

Another one of her projects, non-profit Fluenz.org, distributes free English language programs for people in need. More recently, she partnered with Lonely Planet to create FluentRoad.com, an online program for travelers interested in learning Travel Spanish. Sonia also has her own video series "Almost Free" on Scripps Network's Ulive.com.

In the spring of 2016, Sonia became a co-founder and investor at Nuverz.