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Brainly

Brainly is an education technology company founded in Kraków, Poland and headquartered in New York City.

History

The company, initially named Zadane.pl, was founded in 2009 in Poland by Michał Borkowski (the current chief executive officer),[2] Tomasz Kraus, and Łukasz Haluch. Their website is a peer-to-peer platform where students can ask questions and answer them for other students.[3] Ranks are provided to students who offer high-quality answers.[4] The platform is moderated by both volunteers, staff, and machine learning algorithms.[5] The first million unique monthly users were achieved within 6 months after the release.[6]

In January 2011, the company founded Znanija.com, a Russian language version of the platform.[7]

In June 2016, Brainly acquired the US-based OpenStudy.[8][9]

In January 2018, Brainly announced the acquisition of the video education start-up Bask to incorporate video features into its platform.[10]

In 2020, the company saw a significant increase in its number of users, attributed to the global COVID-19 pandemic, from 150 million in 2019 to approximately 350 million in 2020.[11][12]

In 2020, numerous users on the Art of Problem Solving website found that Brainly had compromised the integrity of the American Mathematics Competitions after posting the questions on its website along with the correct answers. This led to Brainly updating its honor code.

As of 2020, the company had raised approximately $150 million in funding from investors.[12]

In 2023, Brainly implemented artificial intelligence (AI) features for the platform.[13]

In 2024, Brainly released Test Prep, a tool that generates practice questions for exams.[14]

In 2025, Brainly evolved from a community-led platform into a comprehensive AI Learning Companion, introducing agentic AI support for homework help, tutoring, test preparation, and active classroom participation in the US. Other countries remained community-led.[15]

Criticism

ToS;DR (Terms of Service; Didn't Read), a project which analyzes terms of services (ToS) and privacy policies of websites, ranks Brainly at grade D.[16]

See also

  • Economy of Poland

External links

References

  1. Ray Ravaglia. Brainly Evolving From Questions And Answers To AI Learning Companion Forbes, 2024-01-23, retrieved 2025-04-03^
  2. Christopher Salvi. How AI Is Helping the Founder of Brainly Transform Online Education Entrepreneur, 2024-11-20, retrieved 2025-05-01^
  3. Anthony Noto. Brainly banks on OpenStudy to improve education tech www.bizjournals.com, 15 June 2016, retrieved 2025-05-15^
  4. Brainly – Leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to do your homework Digital Innovation and Transformation, retrieved 2021-12-28^
  5. Paul Sawers. With 150 million users, Brainly raises $30 million to expand its social learning platform in the U.S. VentureBeat, 2019-07-25, retrieved 2020-09-01^
  6. Liesha Petrovich. With 80 Million Users, Poland-based Brainly is Changing Education HuffPost, BuzzFeed, 2016-12-22, retrieved 2019-01-31^
  7. Andrii Degeler. Crowdsourced School Homework: Brainly Plans to Teach the US TNW, 2014-03-17, retrieved 2018-06-18^
  8. Brainly Acquires US Social Learning Platform, OpenStudy EdSurge, 2016-06-14, retrieved 2017-10-18^
  9. Social Learning Platform OpenStudy Joins the Brainly Community Yahoo! Finance, 2016-06-14, retrieved 2016-10-03^
  10. Steve O'Hear. Brainly acquires Bask to add video to its peer-to-peer learning platform for students TechCrunch, 2018-01-25^
  11. Nick Westerby. Education app becomes world's number one after surge in popularity caused by pandemic 2020-11-26, retrieved 2020-11-27^
  12. Brainly raises $80M as its platform for crowdsourced homework help balloons to 350M users TechCrunch, 17 December 2020, retrieved 2022-03-12^
  13. eSchool News Staff. Brainly Announces Beta Access to New AI Features, Developed with OpenAI's GPT-4 for Personalized Learning eSchool News, 2023-04-17, retrieved 2023-10-31^
  14. Brainly unveils AI-powered test prep to boost student success EdTech Innovation Hub, retrieved 2025-05-01^
  15. Brainly AI Learning Companion is the Tutor Students Need Forbes^
  16. Brainly -- Terms of Service; Didn't Read ToS;DR, retrieved 2022-04-01^