Iversity operates an online learning platform that began in 2011 offering collaboration tools and relaunched as a MOOCs platform in early 2013. After five years of funding rounds the company aimed to build a 'Coursera of Europe' but filed for insolvency in June when it failed to raise its next financing. Its CEO, Hannes Klöpper, says valuation and burn rate were too high and that two main shareholders—Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture and bmp—stopped investing in 2015, contributing to its capital problems. Iversity secured a seed investment from Holtzbrinck Digital that Klöpper describes as "solid" and as providing a long-term financing perspective, though the investment is pending creditors' council approval. As part of the deal it will collaborate with Springer Nature to create digital degree programs, offer Springer Nature distance-education programs in digital format, and experiment with new formats to complement textbook business. The company intends to continue offering MOOCs but has shifted focus toward the B2B segment, building public professional-development courses and developing customised corporate learning solutions. Iversity operates an online platform for higher-education courses and MOOCs, having pivoted from an LMS model in 2011 and relaunched by Hannes Klöpper. The platform hosts 51 online courses and has reached nearly 700,000 enrolments. It cooperates with more than 30 partners, including the University of Padua, the Hertie School of Governance, the European University Institute and RWTH Aachen, and is in talks with over 100 universities. The company plans to use new funding to systematically enhance platform functionality, hire additional employees, attract new university partners and grow its user base. With the closing of the recent financing, iversity has now received more than €5M in venture capital since its foundation. iversity is a provider of a cloud education platform that combines the communicative nature of the university with social-network dynamics to let faculty and students create courses, research projects and events. Its platform features file sharing, discussion forums for academic content, class calendars and student notifications, online annotation of texts and images, and print-on-demand services for readers and lecture notes, plus an option to order books. Founded in 2011 by Jonas Liepmann and Hannes Klöpper and based in Neuenhagen bei Berlin, Germany, the company employs around 20 people. In January 2013 iversity raised an undisclosed round of funding with backers that included T‑Venture and new CEO Marcus Riecke. The company intends to use the capital to develop its open online courses across Europe. Prior to this, iversity raised over $2m in 2011 from BFB Early Stage Fund Brandenburg GmbH and bmp media investors AG. iversity offers a SaaS solution for e-learning and e-science that helps teachers and students manage materials and organize seminars, research projects, and conferences. The company was founded by Jonas Liepmann and Hannes Klöpper and is based in Neuenhagen, Germany. After a beta phase in which more than 11,000 users registered at www.iversity.org, the team of twenty international young graduates plans to redesign and further develop the online platform. iversity intends to use the new capital to complete the product development post-beta and to expand globally. Financially, the company has raised €1.1M in venture capital to support those efforts. No other revenue or user metrics beyond the beta registrations were disclosed in the article.

Total raised

$2M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Sep 2011