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

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busuu.com, the Europe's leading language learning community receives substantial funding and adds Brazilian Portuguese to its existing language courses

Madrid, 1st of March 2010 – 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 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.com
busuu.com (http://www.busuu.com) is a free online community for learning languages. Users have access to audio-visual online courses for learning Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and English. Additionally, language skills can be directly improved together with other native speakers of the community via an integrated video-chat application or peer-to-peer text corrections. Thereby, each user of busuu.com is not only a “student” of a foreign language but also a “tutor” of his/her own mother tongue.

The start-up was founded in Madrid in early 2008 and has currently more than 300,000 users from over 200 different countries. busuu.com was a partner project of the UNESCO during the International Year of Languages in 2008 and received a Silver Lion in the International Marketing Festival in Cannes in 2009 among other prestigious awards.
In January 2010, busuu.com entered into a strategic partnership with the leading German language learning publisher PONS.

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.
For more information about busuu.com, please visit: http://www.busuu.com