Language learning community busuu.com receives substantial funding and adds Portuguese to its language courses

(I-Newswire) March 1, 2010 - Madrid, 1st of March 2010 – busuu.com (http://www.busuu.com) Europe´s leading web 2.0 community for learning languages, closes its first funding round from an Austrian Business Angel. The important six-digit investment from the serial entrepreneur will be used to further expand the language learning platform and to grow its international outreach. The Austrian investor will join busuu.com´s advisory board.

Bernhard Niesner, Co-Founder of busuu.com says: “The closing of this substantial financial investment once again strongly affirms our position in the global language learning market. This very important step allows us to continue to revolutionize the way people learn languages!”

As a first step of the expansion, busuu.com (http://www.busuu.com) announces today the launch of fully interactive online courses for learning Brazilian Portuguese.

busuu.com is a free online community for learning languages with currently more than 300,000 users from over 200 different countries. Users have access to interactive language courses for learning Spanish, French, German, Italian, and English. From today, Brazilian Portuguese is also available as the sixth language offered within busuu.com´s course portfolio. Every language course on busuu.com comprises 4 different levels ranging from beginner to intermediate with more than 150 interactive learning units.

Besides individual studyies, users can also improve their language skills directly with other native speakers of the community via integrated video-chat and peer-to-peer text corrections.
busuu.com was founded in Madrid in early 2008. It recently partnered with the leading German language learning publisher PONS. The language learning platform has received various prestigious international awards and was a partnering project of the UNESCO in 2008 during the International Year of Languages. Revenues are undisclosed but growing rapidly with several thousand users paying for premium memberships in order to get access to additional learning functionalities.
 

About Busuu:
busuu.com (http://www.busuu.com) is a free online community for learning languages. Users have access to audio-visual learning material covering more than 150 different day-to-day topics. Additionally, language skills can be directly improved together with native speakers from around the world. Users connect via an integrated video-chat with other native speakers of the community to practice their conversational skills. Each user is not only a “student” of a foreign language but also a “tutor” of his own mother tongue.
The start-up was founded in Madrid at the beginning of 2008 and has currently more than 250,000 users from over 200 different countries.
The name of the site comes from the Busuu language of Cameroon, which according to an ethnological study from the 80s is only spoken by 8 people.

Company Contact Information
Busuu
Juliette
Nuñez de Balboa
28001
Phone : +34 915 763 150