BibliU Raises $4.2m USD

We will be using the money wisely, investing in our London and Chicago operations, to continue our exponential growth and to deliver digital textbooks to students and institutions across the globe.

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Some of the very best names in the business have backed us, and we are grateful for their capital and expertise.

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Fritz Demopoulos, the co-founder and former CEO of the Chinese online travel platform Qunar, is among them. He certainly knows how to build a successful digital platform: during his time at the helm of Qunar a majority stake in the company was sold to Baidu for a reported $306 million.

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Leading this investment round is the family office of the co-founder and former CEO of indeed.com, Paul Forster. He says, “BibliU is bringing digital textbooks out of the dark ages, enabling students to search across and access content from comprehensive lists of core and supplementary texts. By breaking down the walls around publishers and individual textbooks, the company is giving students and teachers a superior learning experience”.

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This round of investment further strengthens our long-standing ties to Oxford University. Our CEO David Sherwood first came up with the idea for BibliU when travelling on the Trans-Siberian railway en route to beginning his time as a Rhodes Scholar at the university. The company was founded through the university’s startup incubator; the university’s Innovation Fund has just increased its investment.

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The venture capital fund Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI) has done so too. Matt Arnold, the Principal of OSI, says, “We’re proud to see BibliU maturing into an international company and expanding into new markets. Students beyond the UK will now benefit from the company’s pioneering model which makes eTextbooks more affordable and accessible for students. I’m delighted at how far the firm has travelled and excited to see what the future brings”.

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This is the latest step in our journey. In a mere four years we have reached deals to serve more than twenty-two institutional clients including the world-class Universities of Oxford, Bath and Manchester. We also work with more than two thousand publishers including Pearson and McGraw Hill.

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In light of the latest round of investment, our CEO says, “Students want their educational content online, personalised and aggregated, just like their news, their music and their TV. BibliU can provide that for textbooks and more, and I think that is what investors are responding to. Together, these investors bring us deep expertise to enable us to truly take BibliU to an international audience”.