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Startup Name: Perlego
Tagline: The spotify for textbooks.
Website: Perlego.com
Founder/Founders: Gauthier Van Malderen & Matthew Davis
In a few sentences, tell us what your startup is all about!
Textbooks are massively overpriced. College textbook prices have risen 1,041% since 1977 or three times the rate of inflation. The reason for this being that the market is highly uncompetitive – five publishers control 80% of the market – and because there is no consumer choice in the purchase; students are obliged to buy what they’re assigned.
Perlego wants to make learning content affordable by offering a monthly subscription for all your learning ebooks.
When was your startup founded? And what stage is your startup currently at?
August 2016. Seed round.
Let us know a bit about your team, who are the key team members and what is their role?
The way we have split the team is in three core functions:
1. Growth: This includes Matthew Jones (a former teacher) who is head of business development. Matthew sets up our strategic partnerships and Oliviero Muzi Falconi who leads our marketing efforts. Gauthier Van Malderen deals with publishing partnerships.
2. Product: This includes our co-founder and CTO Matthew Davis, Vlad Axinte for UX/UI and our full stack, Hunor Szekacs.
3. Operations: This is run by Callum Hubbarde, who joined a few months ago from IBM.
Why did you choose this particular idea and concept to build your startup on?
“Whilst at University, I found myself spending more than £300 a year on textbooks. These were usually outdated and I only ended up having to use four or five chapters per book. In an age where information is always more accessible and affordable, university textbooks are a dinosaur.” Gauthier Van Malderen
“As a former teacher myself, it became really apparent that unless textbooks were available to learners at fair prices and were both easily portable and interactive, millennials simply wouldn’t use them. This diverts attention to other sources of information online, which lack curation and accuracy”. Matthew Jones
If applicable, what is your growth like? And what milestones has your startup achieved so far?:
The monthly subscription model, along with our innovative royalty model for publishers allows us to provide Perlego at a fair and affordable price point. Our royalty model also works very favourably for publishers, and has allowed us to rapidly grow our content library by already partnering with over 240 publishers including Wiley, Palgrave and Oxford University Press.
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