StuDocu, Amsterdam-based student-to-student knowledge exchange platform where students can share knowledge, college notes, and study guides, announced that it has acquired Studybees, an online tool for school leaders, teachers and students.
With the acquisition of Studybees, with an average of 100,000 monthly users, StuDocu plans to accelerate its growth in the German market where it currently attracts 750,000 users every month.
Co-founded by Fabian Klein, Julia Hetzel, and Johannes Saal in 2013, Studybees aims to support students from their first semester to the start of their career by preparing them optimally for their studies. The platform 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.
Speaking on the partnership with StuDocu, Co-founder of Studybees, Julia Koper, said,
“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.”
The company claims to have become one of Germany’s leading exam preparation providers for economics and business administration.
Established in 2013 by Marnix Broer, Jacques Huppes, Lucas van den Houten, and Sander Kuijk, StuDocu (locally known as StudeerSnel) is on a mission 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.
Commenting on the acquisition, Co-founder and CEO of StuDocu, Marnix Broer, said,
“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.”
Broer further added:
“We use a ‘Freemium’-model, which means that 80 percent 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 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, the startup 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.
At present, almost 20 million students from 2,200 universities across 60 countries are using StuDocu to access ‘high-quality’ materials every month.
Last year in May, StuDocu had raised $50 million as a part of its Series B round with the goal of accelerating international expansion.
