The London startup currently has 400,000 paying subscribers who get all-you-can-read access to some 850,000 titles — textbooks, fiction, and other literature that students are assigned as coursework at universities and other higher-learning institutions. That catalog, the startup says, makes Perlego the largest online textbook subscription service in the world.
Mediahuis Ventures, the VC arm of European media group Mediahuis, led the round with participation also from Raine Ventures, the VC arm of Raine Group (the investment bank that’s overseeing the sale of Chelsea FC), and Evli Growth Partners.
This round, a Series B, also had angel investors, such as the two co-founders of Kahoot, Jamie Brooker, and Johan Brand, by way of their We Are Human fund; as well as backing from “strategic” publishers.
Perlego doesn’t disclose which strategics those might be from the long list of its current partners. Perlego (Latin for “I read”) works with 5,000 education publishers, including Cengage, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, and Harvard University Press.
The model is one that seems to be finding some interesting traction with the three sides of Perlego’s marketplace all growing especially in the last two years, at a time when online learning has taken a hold of the world in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It now has linked up with 6,000 institutions to fulfill class and course syllabi across 172 countries. Some 40% of the students that use Perlego are in the US.
In 2021, Perlego saw 450% subscriber growth, and publishers have also warmed to it: its book catalog has gone up 166% in the last year and has grown by more than 500,000 since 2019 when it was at a mere 300,000 titles.
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