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Ie Alumni Start-up Busuu.com Receives €6 Million Investment From Mcgraw-hill Education

IE alumni start-up Busuu.com receives €6 million investment from MCGRAW-Hill Education

2015/07/17

Busuu, the global mobile platform for language learning, has received a €6 million investment from MCGRAW-Hill Education(MHE). Busuu.com was founded by Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti, alumni of IE Business School’s International MBA program, who launched the company in January of 2008 to offer a method they would have liked to have had when they arrived in Spain.

The freemium business model (blend of paid and free of charge materials and services) currently has 50 million registered users.

Bernhard Niesner, CEO and co-founder of Busuu, talked about how the investment would permit the company to improve its products and consequently provide a better language learning experience. Furthermore, MHE will have exclusive rights to distribute Busuu products to service institutions such as schools and universities. “This means that our products will soon be available in hundreds of universities across the world,” says Niesner. “We are very excited about the adaptive capacities of McGraw-Hill Education being added to our platform, and we believe that it will revolutionize the way people learn languages.”

Since Busuu was created in 2008, the number of users has increased at a rate of 100,000 per day. The product is present in Brazil, Russia, China, Turkey, Germany and the US. The company offers audiovisual language courses, both free of charge and fee paying, in 12 languages. The course also include direct interaction with native speakers worldwide. Some two thirds of users access Busuu using mobile devices.