Academia.edu Raises $16M in Series C Funding

academia

Academia.edu, a San Francisco, CA — based platform for free and open access scholarly research, raised $16M in Series C funding.

The round was led by Tencent Holdings, with participation from Social Discovery Ventures. As part of the funding round closing, Tencent’s Dr. Ling Ge has joined Academia.edu’s board of directors.

The company intends to use the funds to invest in the use of natural language processing and machine learning to recommend papers relevant to an academic’s research and to continue investing in its mobile app as well as its premium product suite.

Founded in 2008 in San Francisco by Richard Price, CEO, Academia.edu aims to make academic papers available for free online and accessible by anyone.
The company now has paying subscribers at more than 11,800 universities worldwide. Earlier this month, the platform unveiled a new mobile app allowing for more than 23 million pieces of scholarly work to be read for free and stored offline by anyone with access to an iOS device.

FinSMEs

29/03/2019

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