Digital education publisher Shmoop gets funding from Formation 8 to expand to Asia

Digital education publisher Shmoop is spreading its wings. On Monday, the five-year-old startup, which provides K-12 students with learning guides for all kinds of academic subjects and standardized tests, said it had raised a round of funding, led by Formation 8, to expand into Asia.

The companies did not disclose the size of the round but Fortune reported that it was Shmoop’s first venture capital raise.

Launched in 2007, Shmoop was founded by long-time Silicon Valley executives and “power couple” David and Ellen Siminoff. David Siminoff was an executive with investment group Capital Group and Spark Networks before briefly becoming a partner at Venrock. Ellen Siminoff was an early executive at Yahoo and now sits on the boards of Zynga and the Mozilla Corporation.

Shmoop says its teen-friendly content is created by subject-matter experts from top PhD and masters programs and that its guides come with a “point of view.”

“We want to school you,” the site tells students. “So you don’t get schooled.”

Since launching, the startup says it’s grown to attract seven million unique visitors each month and offers more than 7,000 titles across the web and multiple mobile platforms. David Siminoff told Fortune that, prior to this round, the startup had been funded with about $ 10 million and that the only outside investor was retired Capital Group manager Gordon Crawford. It’s generated revenue from course-material licenses and online advertising, he added.

In addition to the funding, Shmoop announced a long-term partnership with AKAStudy, an Asian mobile education app developer. The company agreed to a shared revenue model and licensing agreement to translate and sell Shmoop’s content in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Other U.S.-based online learning ventures, like Coursera, Udacity and edX, are also more closely eyeing Asia, but while those providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs) focus on higher education and lifelong learners, Shmoop targets K-12 students.

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