Brainly's Journey: From Side Hustle to Global Online Education Powerhouse

Brainly’s CEO Michał Borkowski co-founded the platform in 2009 with two friends, Tomek Kraus and Łukasz Haluch, when they were just out of college in Poland. Brainly started as an idea to transfer all the benefits of the real-life collaboration and study groups between students into an online space. Initially, Brainly was supposed to just be a side project, but after a year the platform had one million users and it became clear that it would become something much more.

Today, Brainly is the world’s largest online learning and homework help community with more than 350 million users each month. Brainly has users in 35 countries across the globe including the United States, Poland, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Latin America and Turkey, among others.

At brainly.com, and its group of websites and apps around the world, students connect with their peers and experts to both receive and offer help with homework problems and questions on a wide range of subjects including English, math, history, and the arts, among others. Brainly’s mission is to inspire students to share and explore knowledge in a collaborative community. 

Every answer provided by community members on Brainly includes a detailed explanation of how they arrived at the solution, which helps students go from questioning to understanding. One of the keys to success for the platform is that its users give back to the online community and don’t just take from it. About half of the students who come in asking a question stick around to answer one later. This reinforces the knowledge they’re learning and fosters a collaborative community where students learn as they work together to solve problems. 

Ask any teacher, student, administrator, or parent of school-aged kids, and they’ll tell you that school looks very different now than it did prior to COVID-19. The way students are learning has changed fundamentally, accelerating the need for digital solutions that bridge the gap between the classroom and remote study. 

While Brainly was already the world’s largest online learning and homework help platform before the pandemic, it took on a whole new dimension of importance with the shift to virtual learning and the surge in the usage of tools to help home learners do their work better. 

This led to the launch of Brainly for Parents in 2020, a new feature that gives guardians the ability to pair their account with their child’s so they can take part in their child’s learning experience on Brainly. And in 2021, Brainly added Math Solver to its suite of learning tools. Math Solver is an AI-powered app that provides an instantaneous step-by-step solution to any math equation. It was created to remove the confusion and anxiety from mathematics and provide users with a clear path to solving even the most complex algebra problems.

Brainly Tutor, which provides students with real-time access to live chat support for the subjects that challenge them the most, was also launched in 2021. The new product is dedicated to connecting students with live expert help whenever and wherever they need it. In seconds, Brainly users are connected with an authorized tutor from the platform’s extensive global pool of expert staffers. 

With the goal of democratizing education for all students across the globe, Brainly is continuing to expand its platform functionality and product offerings. Eventually, Brainly hopes to create a more even playing field so that all students have access to a built-in support system instead of only the privileged.