Brainly

Brainly is the world's largest peer-to-peer learning community for students, parents and teachers. At Brainly, students connect to both receive and offer help with homework problems and questions. The unique opportunity for students to freely ask questions and gain the confidence that comes from helping others and inspires students to learn in a collaborative community that receives more than 200 million users each month.

Brainly

Type of business	Private
Type of site	Social network service Professional network service
Available in	Hindi, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Indonesian
Founded	2009 (2009)
Headquarters	New York City, New York, United States Krakow, Poland
Area served	35+ Countries
Created by	Michał Borkowski Tomasz Kraus Łukasz Haluch
Key people	Michał Borkowski Tomasz Kraus
Industry	Technology-based education.
Parent	Brainly.com
URL	https://brainly.com https://brainly.in https://brainly.pl https://brainly.lat https://brainly.ro
Alexa rank	1885 (June 2020)[1]
Registration	Not required
Users	200 million[2]
Current status	Active

Brainly

Stable release	iOS 4.10.1 (May 2, 2019 (2019-05-02)[3]) Android 4.7.0 (May 2, 2019 (2019-05-02)[4]) [±]
Operating system	iOS, Android
Website	iOS Android

Based in Kraków, Poland, with its US headquarters in New York City, Brainly is currently available in 35 countries. The network has elements of gamification in the form of motivational points and ranks, and encourages users to engage in the online community by asking questions and answering those of other students.

History

Initially called Zadane.pl, the company was founded in 2009 in Poland by Michał Borkowski (current chief executive officer), Tomasz Kraus and Łukasz Haluch. The first million unique users monthly was achieved within 6 months after the release.[5] In January 2011, the company founded Znanija.com, the first international project dedicated to Russian language speakers.[6] Several other versions in multiple languages for the following markets included Turkey (eodev.com), Latin America and Spain (brainly.lat) and Brazil (brainly.com.br). In December 2013, seven new language versions of Brainly were released, including English (brainly.com), Indonesian (brainly.co.id), Indian (brainly.in), Filipino (brainly.ph),[7] Romanian (brainly.ro) and Italian (brainly.it) sites. Brainly was initially funded by the co-founders, but then raised funds from Point Nine Capital[8][9]. In October 2014, the company announced that it had raised another round of funding from General Catalyst Partners, Runa Capital and other venture capital firms.[10] The total amount of the investment was $9 million and allowed further product development, as well as the opening of the US-based headquarters in New York City.[11][12]

In May 2016, another funding round of $18 million of combined debt and equity was disclosed.[13] In June 2016, Brainly acquired the US-based OpenStudy.[14][15]

In March or April 2017, Zadane.pl changed to Brainly[16].

In October 2017, Brainly raised $14 million in the funding round led by Kulczyk Investments.[17] In January 2018, Brainly announced it had acquired the video education start-up, Bask,[18] to bring video technology to the Brainly platform.[19] In July 2019, Brainly raised $30 million in a Series C funding round led by Naspers, with participation from Runa Capital and Manta Ray.[20] The total funds raised by the company since its establishment is reported to be $68.5 million. [21]

Website

General overview

Brainly provides questions and answers for students and parents looking for help with homework-related tasks. Students use Brainly to strengthen their skills across many subjects such as math, history, science, and social science. The platform allows them to connect with their peers, subject matter experts, and professional educators to discuss their subjects and seek answers to their questions. Users may post comments to every question and answer and can freely collaborate on problems. All questions are categorized by subject, respective of country and school level.[22]

Gamification

Each user is given a fixed amount points upon registration, which are used to ask questions. Subsequently, one can answer questions to gain additional points.

Ranks and Ranking

Initially, Brainly automatically gives you ranks depending upon number of points you have earned and number of Brainliest answers you have. For example, Genius rank is given to the user who has earned 15000 points and 50 Brainliest answers by answering questions. If someone is interested in specific subject and answers a lot questions in that subject, some geographical domains of Brainly provide that user a Subject or Wizard rank. For example, if a user has answered 500 questions in Mathematics with 50 or more Brainliest answers, then the user may apply for the rank "Maths Aryabhatt" (Example considered from Brainly.in).

Brainly users who have helped a lot of other users are provided with some special ranks. The criteria for this ranks is dependent upon the number of questions that user has answered, number of points user has, number of thanks and/or other criterion. Besides this, Brainly provides teacher ranks to professional teachers.

Brainly also has a leaderboard system or ranking system. This system has four time intervals: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly. The Brainly system considers the data of all users and checks for users who have answered the most questions and have earned the most points in a particular time interval. According to this, the top users are sorted into the Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly leaderboards.

Content Moderation

Brainly, a site with 250 million users, includes different students, teachers and parents. As like any website, Brainly also has some users who violate the site rules, including copy-pasting answers from other sources, spamming irrelevant comments, posting assessment questions, and many others. To handle these users and to keep Brainly for educational purposes, Brainly gives the opportunity to its users to become a moderator. The process of becoming a moderator varies slightly between each geographical domain. In general, the first step is to positively contribute to the site by providing quality answers to many questions. Then, one may apply and potentially be accepted into an entry-level team, which may be referred to as a Stars team, a Trusted Helpers team, or another name, depending on the geographical domain. When one receives sufficient training and is deemed competent by a team leader or leaders, one may be selected as Moderator. Depending on a moderator's experience and execution of their duties, they can receive a promotion to the next rank. In this way, Brainly provides opportunity for students and other users to gain online volunteer experience with a well-established company while facilitating good leadership, teamwork and communication skills.

References

1. "Brainly.com Traffic, Demographics and Competitors - Alexa". www.alexa.com.
2. "Brainly ma już 150 mln użytkowników. Jak polska platforma zmienia rynek edukacji". Forbes.pl.
3. "Apple on the App Store". iTunes Store. 2019-05-02. Retrieved 2019-05-02.
4. "Brainly Homework Help & Solver". Google Play Store. 2019-05-02. Retrieved 2019-05-02.
5. Petrovich, Liesha. "With 80 Million Users, Poland-based Brainly is Changing Education". HuffPost. The Huffington Post Media Group. Retrieved 31 January 2019.
6. Degeler, Andrii (March 17, 2014). "Crowdsourced School Homework: Brainly Plans to Teach the US". The Next Web.
7. "Tech in Asia - Connecting Asia's startup ecosystem". www.techinasia.com.
8. "Social Learning Network Brainly Raises $500K From Point Nine Capital, Angels".
9. http://www.pointninecap.com/brainly Archived 2014-05-29 at the Wayback Machine, Point Nine Capital
10. O'Hear, Steve. "Schoolwork Q&A Site Brainly Scores $9M Series A To Answer The U.S. Expansion Question". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-04-18.
11. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-10-26. Retrieved 2017-09-08.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
12. CNBC.com, Elaine Pofeldt, special to. "Guess where a big crop of unicorns is coming from". CNBC. Retrieved 2016-04-18.
13. "Form D: Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities". US Securities and Exchange Commission. 25 May 2016. Retrieved 3 October 2016.}
14. "Brainly Acquires US Social Learning Platform, OpenStudy - EdSurge News". EdSurge. 2016-06-14. Retrieved 2017-10-18.
15. "Social Learning Platform OpenStudy Joins the Brainly Community". Press release. 14 June 2016. Retrieved 3 October 2016.
16. "Zadane.pl - Uczymy się w grupie". 2017-04-30. Archived from the original on 2017-04-30. Retrieved 2020-02-11.
17. "EdTech Startup Brainly Closes $14 Million - NewsCenter.io". NewsCenter.io. 2017-10-26. Retrieved 2017-11-02.
18. "Bask". www.usebask.com.
19. "Brainly acquires Bask to add video to its peer-to-peer learning platform for students".
20. "Brainly, a crowdsourced homework helper for students, raises $30M to expand in the US". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2019-08-22.
21. "Brainly Funding Rounds". Crunchbase.
22. Coleman, Alison. "Global Ed-Tech Disruption From Poland: Crowdsourced Homework". Forbes.