Odilo Raises $64M As Its White-Label E-Learning Library Passes 8,500 Customers And 170M Users

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E-learning — whether it’s in the form of a supplement to physical materials or live lessons; or the primary or even only medium being used — is now an indelible part of the educational experience; and now a startup out of Spain that’s built a platform to help deliver e-learning in more places is announcing a growth round of funding to expand its business further. Rodrigo Rodriguez, the founder and CEO, described Odilo to me as a “Netflix” for education because of its large catalogue — the company has so far amassed a catalogue of 3.9 million items, including some 3 million books but also podcasts, full courses and other materials, from 6,300 publishers in 43 languages — and the fact that people dip into that content on an on-demand, use-whatever-you-want basis. The company has grown out of two significant trends in tech. It was notable to me that Google is one of Odilo’s customers: the company, one of the world’s undisputed tech giants, has made a big push into education by way of products like its collaborative multi-media Google Classroom; its Google Scholar academic material search; YouTube of course; its primary search engine and so much more. These are very common in other areas of tech that are otherwise very complex to build from the ground up — e-commerce backends (Shopify or Commercetools for example), content management systems (eg Contentful) — and now Odilo is effectively using that same model and applying it to e-learning.(And to point out, there are others also pursuing the idea of building platforms that let others create customizable libraries of e-learning: Perlego in London has described itself as a “Spotify” of e-learning pursuing something similar and also raising money to build that out; the scale of Odilo is very impressive in that regard, though.) It uses Odilo to build training and education libraries for its people, Rogriduez told me, but had it ever approached Odilo to build a more consumer-facing offering? “Odilo is an innovative player in the high-growth educational content market, with an impressive product range, a vast content catalogue and best-in-class digital infrastructure,” said Francesco Canessa, a principal at Bregal Milestone, in a statement. As a leader in its field with a strong, sticky customer base and a unique offering, ODILO is exactly the kind of business we look for, and we’re excited about the growth prospects ahead as we work together.”