StudyBlue is a crowdsourced flash-card study platform that aggregates user-created study materials and bundles class- and textbook-specific content so students can access peer-created guides in one place. The site reports 6 million student users and 250 million study materials. The company launched a visual, Pinterest-like redesign across desktop, iOS and Android, improved search/navigation to surface people, classes and materials together, and added deck preview pages. Co-founder Chris Klundt has returned to the CEO role while Becky Splitt moves to head of strategic initiatives and executive chairman. StudyBlue has moved most of its team from Madison, Wis., to Silicon Valley. The company plans a paid StudyBlue PRO tier launching September 1 with pricing at $9/month, $24/three months, or $48/year (free for new opt-ins until August 31) and features such as audio, images, text formatting and equations. At the end of June StudyBlue received a $1.7 million “mini” Series A infusion, which the company says was used to boost salaries, hire staff and fund the redesign. StudyBlue offers a web and mobile "digital backpack" that enables college, high school and middle-school students to store and organize course materials and convert them into flashcards, quizzes and study guides. The platform has amassed over 100 million user-generated study materials and attracted 2.5 million users, 1.5 million of whom joined in the past year. Core functionality is free; StudyBlue operates a freemium model with two premium subscriptions ($1 and $5 per month) and ad revenue, and plans to test sponsored offers as an additional revenue stream. The company is focused on mobile-first studying and on expanding international support through localization and additional languages. It has begun adding teacher-specific features so educators can identify themselves and share materials with students. StudyBlue plans to scale its team and operations to keep pace with growth and is exploring deeper traction in middle school and potential district-level adoption. StudyBlue provides a study platform for college students to upload or transcribe class notes, store them in the cloud, and organize them into flashcards and study guides. The service can intelligently generate quizzes from a student’s notes and allows flashcards to be accessed on mobile or printed. Over the past two years StudyBlue expanded from 25 to more than 500 U.S. campuses and has more than 100,000 students using the platform. The company already offers an iPhone app and plans to use new funding to develop Android and iPad apps. StudyBlue will also use the investment to expand to additional university campuses. The articles report that the startup has raised a total of $6.5 million to date.

Total raised

$14M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Aug 2014