Latest news with #Perlego
Entrepreneur
13-06-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Entrepreneur UK's London 100: Perlego
Industry: EdTech Perlego is flipping the textbook game with its "Spotify for Textbooks" model — giving students unlimited access to 1.5m+ academic titles via subscription. Its AI tool, Dialogo, levels up learning with smart, verified insights, while keeping publishers paid. Their first US academic partnership with Westcliff University is already making waves, and with reader engagement up 217%, Perlego is proving that digital textbooks can actually work for students.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'Engagement for e-learning will be huge for us'
Just over a week after launching edtech platform Perlego, co-founders Gauthier Van Malderen and Matt David faced their first major challenge when their website was hacked. 'Nothing worked to be honest,' says Van Malderen, CEO of the London-based subscription library branded the 'Netflix and Spotify for textbooks' by providing unlimited access to academic and professional titles. 'I often make the joke that if I had known how complicated it was, I would have never started this business.' This came against no publishing and tech experience which today underpins the growing business, as well as industry scepticism. 'Who is this guy?' was a common theme. But passion and persistence in Van Malderen's product has paid off as he aims to revolutionise the way educational resources are accessed. Read More: 'Why we set up a sustainable mobile operator to save people money' Perlego today offers learners more than 1 million educational ebooks in multiple languages and has raised £56m since launching in 2017. The idea for the company came as Belgium-born Van Malderen studied for a masters in entrepreneurship at Cambridge University. 'It came out of a personal pain point of mine, which was the expensive price of textbooks and where I'd buy a second-hand book,' he says. 'Print is an amazing product. We're just trying to be more convenient than print.' Launched eight years ago this month, it took six months for Perlego's fledgling site to build traction with paying consumers and some publishers, which now include Routledge, Cambridge University Press and Harvard University Press, sending their content to be aggregated on the edtech's platform. Perlego's platform, says Van Malderen, isn't simply a place to search for textbooks. 'I think engagement on the content is going to be a big thing for Perlego, but also for the future of the industry in the next three four years,' he adds. Subscribers can highlight, annotate and search within ebooks, while the tool can create references in a matter of clicks. Additional product layers include slide shows, a 'read aloud' tool and building workspaces to aggregate learning material. Read More: 'People hung up on us in our goal to become the Dyson of ice baths' 'It saves time for professors and also streamlines the lives of students because historically they have to go on lots of different other products,' he adds. Van Malderen and co-founder Davis' most recent raise came last year from lead investor Sir Terry Leahy, former Tesco CEO, who said that "Perlego is addressing one of the most pressing challenges in modern education – access to essential learning materials". The funding has helped develop Perlego's AI tool Dialogo, called Research Assistant, which enables students to ask questions and share relevant cited research in summary format. 'We have to be really careful how we navigate the AI space,' admits Van Malderen. 'What we want to make sure is we're helping publishers monetise their content, making sure that students continue to learn and for faculty and professors is how can they find their content as fast as possible.' The US is currently Perlego's biggest market, while the platform works with more than 350 universities. Last year it partnered with University of Leeds to provide its students access to an extensive digital library which cuts costs (a monthly subscription is £12) and time spent seeking print textbooks. With more than 250 million higher education students enrolled globally, Van Malderen sees opportunities to scale. 'Essentially, with one e-book, you can sell across the world and it's really exciting from that perspective,' he says. 'There's so much more we can do, and it's a big market that we can still grow into.' In 2023, Perlego research revealed that there were 300,000 searches to piracy textbook sites in that September alone, costing the publishing industry billions of pounds in lost revenue. 'I think the publishers were more open towards new models and they saw that the subscription models worked well in music and in the movie industry,' Van Malderen says of the industry. Read More: 'I've seen how weight loss can be life-changing for patients' 'I've been crafting up that message and working much closer with publishers, helping them on piracy and data, creating recurring revenue lines and mitigating the decrease in their print sales.' This includes Perlego delivering reports on how students interact with publishers' content. 'We provide this all for free back to the publishers on a daily or weekly basis, depending on how much they want it,' says Van Malderen. 'The biggest trend in education right now is lifelong learning. This is really valuable for editorial decisions and a lot of publishers are seeing that psychology is going through the roof.' A field hockey player turned cyclist in his spare time, the entrepreneurial bug has been a constant for the Belgian. At university he founded Iconic Matter, which sold advertising on notebooks and built up clients such as Uber and Red Bull. At Perlego, he also founded a small business called Social Lives, which was later sold to businessman Steven Bartlett. He currently has a print-on-demand side hustle. You can't say that Van Malderen is resting, especially after Perlego grew by 435% during COVID. 'I don't believe too much in the work-life balance when you're building a massive company and you're ambitious to build a global brand,' he says. 'I also don't believe fully in the work-life balance where you finish at four every day. I just don't think it's achievable, in my opinion, from what I've seen so far. 'I've always had a big vision and I've always been true to my vision about building a global company. And now the bigger vision is hopefully to continue to scale this and become a European edtech success story.' Read more: GoTo CEO's eight business rules to be a successful leader How my IBM boss taught me to navigate a complex organisation 'Want to grow an iconic brand? CEOs have to value CMOs as servant leaders'Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
