Spotify helped pave the way for a new model for consumers to listen to music: pay a monthly fee to stream whatever you want, with no need to own any physical or digital versions of it. Now, a startup called Perlego, which has been applying that concept to academic textbooks, has picked up $50 million to expand its business after seeing its platform boom through Covid-19. The London startup currently has 400,000 paying subscribers who get all-you-can-read access to some 850,000 titles -- textbooks, fiction and other literature that students are assigned as coursework at universities and other higher-learning institutions. That catalogue, the startup says, makes Perlego the largest online textbook subscription service in the world.

Mediahuis Ventures, the VC arm of European media group Mediahuis, led the round with participation also from Raine Ventures, the VC arm of Raine Group (the investment bank that's overseeing the sale of Chelsea FC), and Evli Growth Partners. This round, a Series B, also had angel investors, such as the two co-founders of Kahoot, Jamie Brooker and Johan Brand, by way of their We Are Human fund; as well as backing from "strategic" publishers.

Perlego doesn't disclose which strategics those might be from the long list of its current partners. Perlego (Latin for "I read") works with 5,000 education publishers, including Cengage, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Harvard University Press.

Image Credits: Perlego (opens in a new window)

Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis founded the company in 2017, when, as newly minted university grads, they were inspired to build a platform to address what they felt was an acute financial issue for students: the very high cost of textbooks.

"This was a pain point of mine," Van Malderen said, recalling how he would typically pay £200-£300 for a single book, only to "read one assigned chapter and then never use it again." It was not unlike how you might want to hear a few songs but not a full album by a recording artist. "So I thought, surely a subscription model would work here."