busuu operates a social language-learning platform offering free and paid audio-visual courses in 12 languages with direct interaction with native speakers. The product has a strong presence in Brazil, Russia, China, Turkey, Germany and the U.S., and about two-thirds of users access the platform via mobile. The company says it has over 55 million users and adds as many as 100,000 users each day. Busuu has pursued a lower-burn approach and eschewed large fundraises compared with competitors. As part of the announced deal, busuu plans to explore adding McGraw-Hill Education’s adaptive learning capabilities to its platform. The company recently signed a distribution partnership with Pearson English and will now gain exclusive global B2B distribution through McGraw-Hill Education. Busuu operates a largely free audio-visual online language learning community offering courses and peer interaction. The company says it has more than 25 million users across over 200 countries and is adding about 40,000 new members per day. Founded by Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti in Madrid in early 2008, Busuu grew largely by bootstrapping and raised an angel round last year from Martin Varsavsky. The startup recently moved its headquarters from Madrid to London to scale up. Busuu plans to use the new funding to hire more people and accelerate expansion, particularly in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia and China where demand is career-driven. The TechCrunch item reports that Busuu has raised an angel round from Fon founder Martin Varsavsky. The article does not provide details about Busuu’s core product, market, or service offering. No future plans or strategic uses of the proceeds are disclosed in the piece. The report does not include any operating metrics such as revenue or user counts. Beyond the single investor named, the article gives no further financial or corporate detail about Busuu. busuu.com operates a free-to-join online language-learning community offering pre-made courses split into four levels and a prominent peer-to-peer component that enables video chat and native-speaker corrections. The company recently signed a content partnership with PONS Publishing Group and has gamified elements to incentivize participation as both students and tutors. The platform reports about 300,000 users, mainly from Spain, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Austria, with more than 10,000 new texts written and corrected daily and several hundred live chats running simultaneously. Founded and launched out of Spain by Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti, the two-year-old startup reached break-even last December. With new funding they plan to expand and improve the platform, extend language offerings, build mobile apps and invest in marketing to grow their user base.

Total raised

$12M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2015