After acquiring Springest earlier this year, Amsterdam edtech startup Studytube acquires Dutch-based SPEAKRS

Amsterdam-based Studytube, a customised learning platform for organisations, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Almere, the Netherlands-based inspiration platform SPEAKRS.

This is the second acquisition by Studytube this year. Earlier this year, the Dutch startup acquired Amsterdam’s ‘top-tier’ European training-booking marketplace Springest. 

With this latest acquisition, Studytube will expand the learning range available to its customers with the addition of more than 100 masterclasses by well-known top speakers such as Daan Roosegaarde, Typhoon, Ron Blaauw, Heleen van Royen, Marc Lammers, and Olcay Gulsen.

A ‘high-quality’ learning platform

Founded in 2013 by Homam Karimi, Gerhard Riphagen, Sebastiaan Menheere, and Stepan Suvorov, Studytube aims to make organisations future-ready. 

It offers an all-in-one learning platform that helps organisations make employee learning and development easy, while helping employees to unlock their full potential. The company offers learning products with courses from over 1,000 providers. 

Earlier in February, the company raised €26.4M in its Series B round to scale up its product development team and boost business through strategic acquisitions in Europe.

With 180 employees working across offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Kharkiv (Ukraine), the company aims to expand the team to 300 people and its product team from 60 to 120 people.

How will SPEAKRS benefit Studytube?

SPEAKRS was founded in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, by childhood friends and entrepreneurs Robert de Vries and Arjen Brokking. Due to the pandemic, physical meetings and classroom events were cancelled everywhere. This is where the founders saw an opportunity and started SPEAKRS, an online edutainment platform.

With Robert De Vries’ extensive network – he had previously founded speakers agency Quality Bookings – SPEAKRS got off to a flying start. De Vries, says, “Quality Bookings’s strength lies in its high-quality lectures. With SPEAKRS, we aimed to offer the same excellence in an online environment. We did everything in our power to create masterclasses that we would want to watch ourselves. Our inimitable combination of top speakers, value and entertainment made sure we exceeded those expectations.”

The idea of combining classroom stages and the online world was well received. More than 100 speakers agreed to develop an unparalleled library of online masterclasses together. The aim was to inspire and help companies and their employees in areas such as leadership, entrepreneurship and vitality.

This vision complements Studytube’s learning platform as it will help the company to expand its online learning offer and thereby strengthen its position as an all-in-one learning platform.

SPEAKRS, on the other hand, was looking for a channel to spread its masterclasses among a large target group. Since Studytube’s client base boasts more than 300 organisations, it proved to be a logical choice. Arjen Brokking says, “Every single day, Studytube provides more than 500,000 users with access to its learning platform. That allows us to create an enormous reach for SPEAKRS’s masterclass hosts.”

Brokking adds, “Therefore, these masterclasses are an important addition to our current micro learnings and online courses. Those focus mostly on developing skills and competences, whereas the SPEAKRS masterclasses aim to inspire. As a result, Robert and Arjen have compiled a course offer that is absolutely unique in the Netherlands. It aligns wonderfully with ours and with our goal to give employees access to the world’s best learning content and to inspire them to invest in their personal and professional development.”

With the acquisition of SPEAKRS, the top speakers can be followed online as well as booked offline.