Amsterdam-based edtech scale-up StuDocu (locally known as StudeerSnel), an online platform for students to share knowledge, announced that it has acquired its German equivalent Studybees.
Studybees co-founder Julia Koper says, “We are very happy that we found a partner who shares our mission to help all students become successful in their studies, and in life. With this shared ambition and StuDocu’s proven track record we know Studybees and our users will be in good hands.”
“Building the first smart learning platform”
Founded in 2013 by Fabian Klein, Julia Hetzel, and Johannes Saal, Studybees is an edtech startup that aims to support students from their first semester to the start of their career by preparing them optimally for their studies. It uses online content to help German college and university students in the fields of business administration, economics and law, prepare for their exams.
Studybees offers both an online tutoring marketplace and an e-learning platform, reaching 100,000 students every month, as well as offline exam preparation courses in 40 cities throughout Germany. The courses offered by the platform are tailor-made for specific courses and exams.
In 2019, the founders decided to extend the offline offering with their online study platform, StudybeesPlus. With the coronavirus pandemic starting in 2020, this turned out to be the right decision. The company now claims to have become one of Germany’s leading exam preparation providers for economics and business administration.
How will Studybees help StuDocu?
The acquisition of Studybees, with an average of 100,000 monthly users, will help StuDocu accelerate their growth in the German market where they currently attract 750,000 users every month.
StuDocu’s co-founder and CEO Marnix Broer, says, “Germany is one of our key markets where we see very promising growth. Being able to add the high-quality, course-specific content from Studybees to our German offering and welcoming 100,000 students a month, will accelerate this growth significantly. Besides that, we are thankful to have the founding team of Studybees with all their relevant experience staying on as advisors.”
Both companies were founded by students for students, with a mission to help students reach their full potential by offering tools to excel in their studies. In 2021, StuDocu raised $50M in a Series B round with the goal of accelerating international expansion, and currently, almost 20 million students from 2,200 universities across 60 countries are using StuDocu to access ‘high-quality’ materials every month.
About StuDocu
The edtech platform was founded in 2013 by Marnix Broer, Jacques Huppes, Lucas van den Houten, and Sander Kuijk. StuDocu’s mission is to empower everyone to excel in their studies by providing the best tools to students who want to share and gain knowledge to help with their studies and future careers.
Speaking about StuDocu’s business model, Broer says, “We use a ‘Freemium’-model, which means that 80 per cent of our documents are freely accessible to anyone and the top 20 per cent content with the highest quality is ‘Premium’, which means they are behind a paywall. However, students can view these Premium documents also by uploading their own study materials, so they don’t have to pay. Although we use very student-friendly prices for our subscriptions, our business is doing very well.”
In June, 2020, amid the coronavirus lockdown, StuDocu announced that it will make its platform available for Dutch HAVO and VWO education, between elementary and college. In addition to an extension to secondary schools, StuDocu also started offering a chat group function to share their study material as it saw that a large number of students did not receive sufficient guidance from the educational facilities themselves while studying remotely and felt very unproductive.
In an attempt to make it more productive, the company added Study Experts to its platform. Those experts included experienced teachers from TentamenTrainingen.nl. These teachers are involved in the chat groups so that they can answer all questions of students in a qualitative way. Studocu hopes that this could help make up for the shortage of guidance needed during distance learning.
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