Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Chegg

Online Textbook Rental Company Chegg Raises $25 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 05:41:29 +0000

Chegg, the large online textbook rental company, has raised $25 million in equity funding according to a form D filing with the Securities and Exchange commission from today. “The funding is led by existing investors to fuel the growth of the business,” stated a Chegg spokesperson in an interview with VentureBeat. Chegg was founded in 2005 and is now available across 7,000 different colleges nationwide.

Chegg has 4.5 million users and has been working on supporting digital textbooks. Chegg also has course reviews and homework help. This past January, Chegg launched an HTML5 electronic textbook reader.

Based in Santa Clara, California, Chegg has over 200 employees. Chegg previously raised $221 million across a combination of equity and debt funding round. Investors in Chegg include Insight Venture Partners, Gabriel Venture Partners, Ace Limited, Pinnacle Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins.

Textbook Service Chegg Acquires Tutor Service Student of Fortune

Riley Kennysmith — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:44:49 +0000

Online textbook rental service Chegg announced today that it has acquired Student of Fortune, a site where students tutor each other. Chegg also recently acquired Cramster, Notehall and CourseRank. With each acquisition the company becomes more than a textbook service, as their newly-revamped website now features a “homework help” section and courses section that offers schedules, reviews and grades distributions. Chegg also now offers an HTML5-based e-reader for textbooks. [Mashable]

Textbook Rentals Service CampusBookRentals.com Raises $20 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 02:34:25 +0000

CampusBookRentals.com is a company that allows customers across 5,600 college campuses to rent textbooks online. CampusBookRentals.com announced a round of growth financing with total equity and credit facilities of over $20 million. CampusBookRentals.com competes directly with Chegg.com and BookRenter.com.

CampusBookRentals.com was started in the basement of Alan Martin, the CEO of the company. CampusBookRentals.com has been profitable since shortly after the company started. CampusBookRentals.com has had trip digital revenue growth until recently.

CampusBookRentals.com allows students to search for books by ISBN, title, author, and keyword. The service also offers free shipping to and from their college dorms. This round of financing was led by Level Equity, Five Elms Capital, and Cherokee & Walker.

[TechCrunch]

Amazon Does Digital Textbooks with Kindle Textbook Rental

Riley Kennysmith — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 16:39:10 +0000

Amazon is now offering Kindle Textbook Rental, giving students digital textbooks for up to 80% off. TechCrunch reports that the service allows students to customize their rental, so they only pay to have the book as long as they need it—anywhere from 30 to 360 days. In addition, Amazon’s Whispersync technology allows students to keep their notes in the Amazon Cloud, and Amazon offers to continue this storage past the end of a rental period.

The Kindle Textbook Rental program works on Kindle devices and Kindle apps, which work on most computers or mobile devices. Other companies, including Chegg, Kno and Inkling, also offer digital textbook rentals.

Chegg In Talks With Bankers About An IPO

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:49:40 +0000

Online textbook rental service Chegg.com is in talks with bankers about a possible IPO. Chegg raised $75 million in funding last autumn, which brought them to a total of $219 million. On SharesPost, it appears that someone wants to buy 20,000-30,000 shares of Chegg at $6.50 per share.

Former Netflix COO Tom Dillon Becomes SVP Of Distribution At Chegg

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:57:10 +0000

Online textbook rental company Chegg.com has announced that they have hired two new executives: Tom Dillon is now the senior VP of distribution and Esther Lam is now the company chief marketing officer.

Tom Dillon
Dillon will be optimizing the product distribution at Chegg to help students get textbooks when they need it. When Dillon used to be the COO at Netflix and helped create 40 distribution centers for the movie rental company across the U.S.

Esther Lam
Lam will be working on the company’s offline and online marketing. Lam previously worked at Unilever as a vice president.

[Press Release]

Cramster.com Gets Acquired By Chegg

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 04:53:35 +0000

Cramster.com, an online homework help website created by Aaron Hawkey, Robert Angarita, and Kaveh Golabi, has been acquired by Chegg.com. The transaction details were undisclosed. Chegg said that this acquisition will add to their textbook rental and course planning services. Cramster had raised $9 million in funding from Primera Capital and Shai Reshef. Cramster has about 1 million users.

Textbook Rental Chegg Raises $75 Million From Asian Company

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:38:19 +0000

Chegg is a very popular online textbook rental service. Chegg has recently raised $75 million from Ace Limited, an Asian-based investment firm. Chegg had $144 million of funding before this. Other venture firms that put money into Chegg include Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital, and Insight Venture Partners.

Chegg started as a classifieds rental service in 2005 on the campus at Iowa State University. Chegg works across 7,000 schools in the U.S and the company employs about 120 people across Silicon Valley and Louisville, Kentucky. Chegg recently acquired CourseRank, a Mountain View, California based start-up where students can share class schedules with friends and write reviews on classes.

[AllThingsD]

Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy Joining Chegg Board of Directors

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:25:32 +0000

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy will join the board of directors of Chegg Inc. Chegg is a Santa Clara, California based company where people can rent textbooks. There is about 4.2 million textbooks in their collection. [San Francisco Business Times]

Kakai Raises $7.5 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Josh Kopelman, and Ron Conway

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:20:36 +0000

Kakai is a stealth company that was started by Chegg founder Osman Rashid and Babur Habib. Interestingly Kakai is still in stealth and raised a Series B round of funding already. The second round is $7.5 million and the investors include venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Josh Kopelman, and Ron Conway. Marc Andreessen is joining Kakai’s board of directors as a result of the funding.

Kakai’s previously raised $1.85 million in Series A from Osman Rashid and Mike Maples. Rumor has it that Kakai has something to do with electronic readers. The portable consumer electronics products made by Kakai will be Linux-based. Kakai currently has about 40 employees. Rashid’s other company Chegg.com has about $144 million in funding and was started in 2005.