Polish edtech startup Brainly is big in Indonesia, just raised $15m

Dimas Mukhlas Widiantoro, country manager for Brainly Indonesia.

Brainly is an edtech startup founded by Polish entrepreneurs Michal Borkowski, Tomasz Kraus, and Lukasz Haluch in 2009.

It’s a simple portal where students can ask education-related questions and solve them collaboratively. The service is free for everyone to use.

By 2014, Brainly had gained enough traction to justify doubling down on emerging markets, where it saw significant user bases forming. Indonesia was one of them. The Brainly team scored US$9m in a series A funding round led by General Catalyst Partners to strengthen its global presence.

And this week, the startup announced it’s raised another US$15 million – this time from South African internet group Naspers.

Staggering growth

If the reported numbers are correct, Brainly’s growth has been impressive. Globally, it claims to have 60 million monthly unique visitors. That’s up from 30 million in 2014.

For Indonesia, Brainly reported 650,000 monthly active users (MAUs) in 2014, with a total of 6 million monthly unique visitors.

In 2016, it sits at roughly 9 million monthly unique visitors.

“74 percent of the users access our site from their mobile phone,” Dimas Mukhlas Widiantoro, Brainly’s country manager for Indonesia, elaborates. “Our users are 90 percent students in the age of 13 to 18 years old. The rest of the users are parents, teachers.”

It’s certainly much more popular in terms of visitors than local edtech startup Zenius, which clocked just under 1 million unique visits in April on both its desktop and mobile websites.

Comparing traffic on desktop and mobile websites for Brainly Indonesia and Zenius. Brainly in blue. Source: Similarweb.

If the ratio of visitors to monthly active users (meaning those who, beyond visiting, ask or answer questions on the site, monitor content quality, or report spam) stayed roughly the same, Brainly has about a million monthly active users in Indonesia.

Brainly’s localized site currently lists a total of 3,045,714 questions asked.

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