Online educational service Highbrow has raised $150,000 from a Ukrainian business angel in a seed round, in exchange for giving the investor a 15-percent share in the budding business.
The investor,
however, wishes to remain anonymous.
“This is a
well-known, serial IT-investor, but he doesn’t like publicity and asked us not
to reveal his name,” Artem Zavyalov, one of the co-founders of Highbrow, told
the Kyiv Post on March 21. He said the investor was an expert in the sphere of
big content projects, and thus was in a position to provide qualified help as
well.
The startup is an
online service that sends out educational courses by email. Users simply choose
a topic, and then get 5 minutes’ worth of brain boosting information every
morning for 10 consecutive days.
Since its
foundation, up until the arrival of its investor, the startup has been developed
using its founders’ own money. The project started out as a Russian-language
website called Eggheado in March 2014, but the team is now fully concentrating
on its more promising English-language twin – Highbrow.
The founders say investment
funds will be used to increase the business’s user base, which is now
approximately 180,000 users, to one million by the end of 2016.
“We haven’t invested
in marketing before — the growth was totally organic,” said Zavyalov. He said Highbrow
will spend some of its investment on experimenting with new, purchased marketing
tools to accelerate its growth.
When the user base
is large enough, a premium-user subscription service is to be introduced. Premium
users’ daily e-mails from Highbrow will be ad-free, and users will be able to
personalize the days and times they get their educational e-mail, as well as
mix several courses together in their study plan.
The startup’s
founders also plan to focus on expanding their course base, which currently
consists of 73 courses on 13 topics.
Both individuals
and companies can create courses for Highbrow. The only condition is that the
creator has to have expertise in the subject of the course. Creating a course has
already proved to be an attractive marketing tool for some companies, with marketing
software platform HubSpot and U.S. startup fund YCombinator already having submitted
material. Highbrow says it plans to develop more co-projects with big companies
in the near future.
Iryna Savchuk can be reached at [email protected]. The
Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by Ciklum,
Steltec
Capital, 1World Online
and SoftServe.
The content is independent of the donors.
