GETTING DIGITAL, ONCE MORE: Chegg, a higher education platform which offers book rentals, online tutoring and other online services for students, has acquired the writing tool Imagine Easy Solutions for $42 million in an all-cash transaction. Of this total, $25 million was paid at closing and the remaining $17 million is due on April 2017.
Imagine Easy Solutions is the the provider of EasyBib, a website best known as an automatic generator of bibliography and citation notes in different academic formats—MLA, APA and Chicago styles. The platform used by seven million unique users in March 2016, also offers a search engine for academic books and articles as well as a plagiarism checker.
Altogether, Imagine Easy Solutions claimed it tallied 240 million individual sessions for its products—EasyBib, Citation Machine, BibMe, Cite This for Me, and Normas APA—in the past 12 months. “By joining Chegg, we accelerate our plans for delivering a complete suite of writing tools that democratize access to great educational resources and provide students with the academic support they need,” said Darshan Somashekar, co-CEO and co-founder of Imagine Easy, in a press release. Somashekar and his co-CEO and co-founder, Neal Taparia, will be joining Chegg as full-time employees.
The announcement of Easy Solutions acquisition came the same day as the release of Chegg's first quarter 2016 results. The company, which started in 2011 as a service to help students to borrow textbooks and went public in 2013, is reporting a 79% renewal rate for Chegg Study subscribers in the quarter and a gross profit of $27.7 million.
