• busuu

  Led · Equity · Jul 2015

  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.

• Unigo

  Led · Equity · Sep 2011

  Unigo.com operates a community-powered website that provides information for finding, getting in and paying for college, with content contributed by college counselors and enrolled students. The site hosts more than 200,000 multimedia reviews by students covering 6,500 campuses, available free of charge. Game mechanics incentivize counselors and students to compete as they contribute, which the company says produced a 400 percent increase in content over the past year. US News & World Report selected Unigo to provide student reviews for its rankings and directories. Unigo plans to use new capital to expand coverage to graduate schools and accredited universities outside the United States and to broaden its reach through alliances with publishers. The company raised $1.6 million in its first round of institutional funding, led by The McGraw-Hill Companies.

No current team members are available.