Busuu, one of the world’s largest social networks for language learning with over 55 million users, today announced that McGraw-Hill Education, a learning science company, has acquired a minority stake in busuu for €6 million.
The deal also authorises McGraw-Hill exclusive global rights to distribute busuu to its B2B customers, including schools, private language institutions and corporations. With the global market for language instruction amounting to $60 billion annually, some may say the partnership between Busuu and McGraw‐Hill Education is a match made in heaven.
The two companies will explore adding McGraw-Hill Education’s industry-leading adaptive learning technology to busuu products. Founded in 2008, busuu has been adding as many as 100,000 users each day. The product has a strong market presence in Brazil, Russia, China, Turkey, Germany and the US. The company offers free and paid audio-visual language courses for 12 languages and includes direct interaction with native speakers around the world.
Bernhard Niesner, the CEO of busuu, also participated as a speaker at our EU-Startups Conference 2014. In relation to this recent deal he stated: “We are especially excited to explore adding McGraw-Hill Education’s adaptive capabilities to our platform and believe this will revolutionise the way people learn languages.”
By the way: You can find out about other interesting startups from the UK in this list.
