SHMOOP: Undisclosed investment round to Mountain View, CA-based Shmoop from Formation 8. Fortune reports that this is the first VC financing for the company, which has previously been self-funded "to the tune of about $10 million" with only one other investor, retired Capital Group manager Gordon Crawford. Shmoop currently has around 30 full-time employees and 100 contracted writers and editors.
Founded in 2007, this oddly-named company offers a collection of playfully-written test prep and learning guides for over 100 subjects. (Fortune quotes co-founder David Siminoff as saying that content writers must make him "laugh twice per paragraph." That's no joke.) The company also announced in the press release a partnership with AKAStudy, an Asian mobile education app developer (and fellow Formation 8 portfolio company), to translate and sell Shmoop content in Chinese, Japanese and Korean markets.
