lynda.com buys Austrian video training firm
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was updated at 11:30 a.m. to correct a quote attribution.]
Fast-growing online education company lynda.com, which last month raised $103 million in its first round of outside financing, has acquired an Austrian video training platform.
Lynda.com said Feb. 14 that it purchased video2brain, a video training site that offers courses in German, French, Spanish and English. The acquisition brings 60 video2brain employees onto Carpinteria-based lynda.com’s payroll. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Video2brain is now a branded division of lynda.com that provides a multilingual library of 1,700 video courses. Based in Graz, Austria, video2brain has more than 400,000 subscribers who purchase access to the library either through individual and multi-user subscriptions, or through DVD and single-course downloads, lynda.com said.
“Having video2brain become part of lynda.com creates a powerful fulfillment of some of our company’s most strategic goals,” Lynda Weinman, co-founder and executive chair of lynda.com, said in a statement.
Video2brain founder Gerhard Koren joins lynda.com as part of the deal and will be a strategic advisor for the Carpinteria-based company’s international expansion, the firms said.
“Since I founded the company, our mission and passion has been to create a great worldwide learning experience,” Koren said in a statement. “This acquisition is an investment in our future as we see a huge growth opportunity in new and emerging markets that demand multi-lingual educational content. We have long envisioned the company providing content in multiple languages. The two options were to organically grow that capability from scratch, or find a company aligned with our culture and business model.”
Lynda.com is one of the fastest-growing firms in the Tri-Counties. Founded in Ojai by Weinman and her husband, Bruce Heavin, in 1995, the company was profitable within two years. Its revenues grew from $14.3 million in 2007 to more than $100 million in 2012. The company now employs more than 400 people and is headquartered at a 12-acre campus in Carpinteria, with additional offices in Ventura and Calabasas.
Lynda.com provides subscription-based online learning tutorials to a library of more than 87,000 instructional videos for topics such as graphic design software and Web programming. The service is used by Fortune 100 companies, higher education institutions, the government and individuals.
When it announced the $103 million private-equity financing round last month, Lynda.com said it planned to use the cash in part to expand into international markets. “Right now, 100 percent of our content is English only. And the way technology and software businesses change, it’s pretty limitless in terms of content and courses that would be covered,” Vice President of Marketing Erik Tarkiainen told the Business Times in January.
[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed the quote by Gerhard Koren.]
