Brainly

Brainly.com

Type of business	Private
Type of site	Social network service
Available in	English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Thai, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Indonesian
Founded	September 2009
Headquarters	Krakow, Poland, New York, New York
No. of locations	2
Key people	Michał Borkowski, Tomasz Kraus
Industry	Educational Technology
Slogan(s)	Homework Help
Website	brainly.co
Registration	Not required
Users	80,000,000+
Current status	Active

Brainly is a multinational educational technology company based in Krakow, Poland^[1] and New York, New York. Brainly operates a group of social learning networks for students and educators. It has over 80 million unique users monthly from over 35 countries (as of January 2017). The first website launched in 2009^[2] in Poland under the name Zadane.pl. Brainly inspires students to share and explore knowledge in a collaborative community, and engage in peer-to-peer educational assistance. The network has elements of gamification in the form of motivational points and encourages users to engage in the online community by asking questions and answering those of other students.^[3]

About

Brainly is a social learning community for students that encourages collaborative learning. It is a social media platform strictly connected to education and learning. It uses social networking features to connect users who intend to share their knowledge within the online community.^[4] The site is dedicated to Elementary School, Middle School, High School, and College students,^[5] as well as teachers, parents and other educators. Each version of Brainly is a free Q&A website customized for each country of operation. The goal is to inspire students to learn within a collaborative environment and expand their knowledge by focusing primarily on homework help. Brainly users come from over 35 countries, and the total size of community is 80 million unique users monthly by January 2017.^[6] Brainly operates as a desktop website, iOS app and Android apps.

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. In January 2011, the company announced Znanija.com, the first international project dedicated to Russian language speakers.^[7] 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, include the English language (brainly.com), Indonesian (brainly.co.id), Indian (brainly.in), Filipino (brainly.ph), Thai language (brainly-thailand.com),^[8] Romanian (brainly.ro) and Italian (brainly.it) sites. Brainly was initially funded by the co-founders, but then raised funds from Point Nine Capital^[9] and Business Angels in 2012.^[10][11] 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.^[12] 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.^[13][14]

In May 2016, another funding round of $18 million of combined debt and equity was disclosed.^[15] In June 2016, Brainly acquired the US-based OpenStudy.^[16]

Website

General overview

Brainly provides questions and answers for students looking for help with homework-related tasks. They can post questions to the community, who offer help in return. Users may post comments to every question and answer and can freely collaborate on problems.^[17] All questions are categorized by subject, respective of country and school level.

Gamification

Each user is given a fixed amount points upon registration, which they can use to ask questions.^[18] Points are mainly earned by answering questions, however there are specific activities, which can earn a user additional points. Each respondent is awarded half of the points given by the inquirer for each answer. Additionally, the author of the question gets the chance to choose one of the answers as the best, which awards both the authors of the question and the answer additional points. The website also features rankings (daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly) of users with the highest number of points gained by answering questions respectively to the correct category chosen on the leaderboards. (“Brainliest Users”).

Community interactions

Social interactions between users are concentrated around a few functions of the platform: the chat/private messaging^[5] system, comments sections in user profiles and comments sections in the question threads. Whereas the first is used for private conversations between the users, the latter two are utilized for collaboration on questions and social interactions within the community. Each user can create their own network of connections by friending other users.

Moderators

A group of users on the site are given the special designation of Moderator.^[19] Moderators are responsible for ensuring that the quality of questions, answers, and social interactions are extremely high on the site. Moderators also assist and guide users through the site and explain how the site works. There is an emergency Moderator contact list for users that are trying to contact a Moderator with a site-related emergency.

References