iversity Closes Funding Round Involving its New CEO and T-Venture

By David Knight |

Cloud-based education platform iversity has announced a financing round involving T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, as well as the startup’s new CEO Marcus Riecke. While the size of the round was undisclosed, they join BFB Frühphasenfonds Brandenburg, bmp media investors AG and Masoud Kamali as investors in iversity.

The money will be used to develop services in Europe similar to those in North America known as MOOCs – massive open online courses.

Riecke will also bring a great amount of know-how to the Berlin-based startup with more than 20 years of experience at Bertelsmann, eGroups (now Yahoo! Groups), eBay, StudiVZ and Monster. He said: “I have recently taken an extended break in which I was able to watch many startups. With iversity, the vision of bringing the world of university teaching to the Internet excites me.”

Iversity, which dubs itself ‘the collaboration network for academia,’ enables students and teachers in higher education to organise courses, research groups and conferences for free. It was co-founded 18 months ago by Jonas Liepmann and Hannes Klöpper. Jonas said: “With the funds raised in this round, our financing has been secured for the foreseeable future. This will enable us to strengthen our team, further concentrate on developing a comprehensive higher education online platform and also implement pilot projects in the field of online university teaching.”

Deutsche Telekom’s Karl Kornwolf praised iversity as one of Europe’s most innovative online education startups: “This collaboration is for us an important building block for implementing our vision, ‘Best Learning’ in the higher education segment. For us, the students and their specific personal circumstances take centre stage.”

The iversity team hard at work