Exciting day for the guys at busuu. They just announced that busuu received a six-figure funding from an Austrian business angel who will also join the company as advisor.
But that’s not all. busuu also announced to finally launch Brazilian Portugese as sixth language to learn.
According to the press release, the funding will be used to further expand the language learning platform and to grow its international outreach.
Of course I will try to get some more insights on this from Bernhard in the long awaited part 2 of the last EDUKWEST interview with him (wink, wink). But let’s have a look at some figures we know.
Livemocha is still the big player in this space with over 4.5 million registered members and 14 million USD in funding. Followed by Babbel with about 600.000 members and ca. 1.5 million USD. And now we have busuu with about 300.000 members and a six-figure funding.
Hence this puts some pressure on Babbel for sure as those two companies are the closest. Both are located in Europe and focus on European languages although the choice of busuu for Brazilian Portugese could be a sign that busuu plans to get some market share in one of Livemocha’s strongholds, too. Could also be for the simple reason that there are far more Brazilian Portugese speakers than classic Portugese speakers, another question for the interview.
Nevertheless, busuu and Babbel are direct competitors on the European market. They have both European publishers as partners, offer a smaller variety of languages and are both targeting basically the same audience.
So this funding brings busuu two important things: time and resources. busuu showed in the past two years that they were able to build up a competitive platform that did not lack any important features compared to its competitors but all of that with a very small amount of money. If Bernhard and Adrian stay on this track busuu will have some great staying power for sure. It will also be interesting to see what features they will be able to launch from now on.
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