- Academia.edu recently announced it raised $23 million in Series D funding. These are the details.
Academia.edu – the academic world’s platform for sharing research papers – recently announced it has grown to 175 million users and is nearing half of the world’s academic research content. And with around 100 million papers written since the 1600s, Academia aims to make every research paper ever written freely available on the internet.
This growth drew $23 million in Series D funding led by Tencent, bringing the total investment raised to $63 million. True Ventures and Greyrock Investments also participated in the funding round. And with this new funding round, the company aims to expand into allowing academics to be peer-reviewed and published in journals hosted on the Academia platform.
Academia is adding 30,000-60,000 papers each day and has 28 million monthly visitors. And Academia’s algorithms make about 20 million paper recommendations a day, connecting users to content from 42 percent of the world’s faculty in over 16,000 universities, including Oxford, MIT, Cal-Berkeley and NYU.
KEY QUOTES:
“What started as a personal project to share my philosophy research now provides more than fifteen times the amount of content than the number of books published each year – that inspires me. I thank our investors for continuing to back the company and its journey from the ivory towers to the information superhighway.”
— Dr. Richard Price, founder and Chief Executive Officer, previously Oxford University academic and serial entrepreneur
“Academia has shown that the academic world not only wants to share its research freely, but also that it’s possible to build a new type of media business around this community and content. Readily accessible research papers will expedite the speed of scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs around the world.”
— Dr. Ling Ge, Chief European Representative at Tencent
