StuDocu, an Amsterdam-based EdTech (education technology) company that is seeing exceptional growth, is announcing $50 million (over R700 million) Series B funding from Partech. The company plans to invest this capital in further boosting its exponential global growth and South Africa is one of the markets they’d like to expand.
StuDocu offers students a platform to exchange knowledge, has passed 15 million users worldwide and reveals they have 100 000 South African students actively using their platform.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to move from social to remote, little to none was known about EdTech and the companies making waves in this industry. But now, a year after students were made to adapt to remote classroom setups and rely solely on technology to communicate with their lecturers and peers, EdTech and the innovations in this arena are finally getting their day in the sun.
At a time when the effectiveness of remote learning is being questioned and Zoom fatigue is now commonplace with students across the globe, StuDocu has hit new highs by reaching 15 million students from 2000 universities across 60 countries. And they believe this is all down to the platform’s ability to give students the power to work smarter, by allowing them fast access to valuable and relevant resources and notes, in a time when they need help most.
“Our online content library was actually started from our dorm rooms,” explains Marnix Broer, CEO and co-founder of StuDocu, “and as students ourselves, we were consistently trying to figure out more efficient ways of collecting useful study resources from our friends and classmates – and this is where the idea of StuDocu was born.”
As an online platform, that gives students the opportunity to share their study materials like lecture notes, summaries and practice materials, and exchange this knowledge with fellow students, StuDocu is on a mission to serve all 200 million college and university students globally.
Previous funding rounds kick-started StuDocu’s expansion to markets like Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and the United States which helped the platform become the international leader in the document sharing space. But it’s not only in developed countries where StuDocu is seeing growth, they recently revealed that countries like Mexico had more than 1.5 million users, Argentina 450 000, and Brazil 280 000 – revealing a strong trend in students working to find better and more effective ways to study remotely.
“Our mission is to help students worldwide make the most of their studies,” says Broer, “and with Partech’s scale-up experience on-board, StuDocu is set up well for reaching even more students with even better products in the years to come.”