Quizlet is a multi-national American company that provides tools for studying and learning. Quizlet was founded in October 2005 by Andrew Sutherland, who at the time was a 15-year old student, and released to the public in January 2007. Quizlet's primary products include digital flash cards,

matching games Matching games are games that require players to match similar elements. Participants need to find a match for a word, picture, tile or card. For example, students place 30 word cards; composed of 15 pairs, face down in random order. Each person tu ...

, practice electronic assessments, and live quizzes. In 2017, 1 in 2 high school students used Quizlet. As of December 2021, Quizlet has over 500 million user-generated

flashcard A flashcard or flash card is a card bearing information on both sides, usually intended to practice and/or aid memorization. It can be virtual (part of a flashcard software) or physical. Typically, each flashcard bears a question or definition ...

sets and more than 60 million active users.

History

Quizlet was founded in 2005 by Andrew Sutherland as a studying tool to aid in memorization for his French class, which he claimed to have "aced". In to an AMA on Reddit, Sutherland said in the "first year and a half" he was "just playing around with it", but that he decided to make it public after convincing ~100 people to try the service. He formed a company called Brainflare with his father as the CFO/Secretary to take care of business concerns. Quizlet's blog, written mostly by Andrew in the earlier days of the company, claims it had reached 50,000 registered users in 252 days online (that is, on September 26, 2007). In the following two years, Quizlet reached its 1,000,000th registered user. According to Sutherland, the company "almost died several times in the first few years" but "continued to grow." Until 2011, Quizlet shared staff and financial resources with the Collectors Weekly website. In 2011, Quizlet added the ability to listen to content using

text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...

. In August 2012, it released an app for the iPhone and iPad and shortly afterward one for Android devices. In 2015, Quizlet announced raising $12 million from

Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, ...

, Costanoa Venture Capital, Altos Ventures, and Owl Ventures to expand its digital study tools and grow internationally. In a blog post, Sutherland later described the first 10 years of the company as "ten years of bootstrapping". Quizlet hired Matt Glotzbach as CEO in May 2016 and launched a redesign in August 2016. Also in 2016, Quizlet launched "Quizlet Live", a real-time online matching game where teams compete to answer all 12 questions correctly without an incorrect answer along the way. In 2017, Quizlet created a premium offering called "Quizlet Go" (later renamed "Quizlet Plus"), with additional features available for paid subscribers. Glotzbach announced in 2018 that Quizlet would be opening offices in

Denver, Colorado Denver ( ) is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Consolidated city and county, consolidated city and county, the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Colorado, most populous city of the U.S. state of ...

in 2018, announcing "a big vision at Quizlet to provide the most intelligent study tools in the world, and our expansion into Denver, a city with incredible tech ingenuity, will help us more quickly build the next generation of learning tools used by students everywhere". Andrew Sutherland left Quizlet at age 30 in 2020, citing disagreements with the executive team and a desire for a change. During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, Glotzbach announced he was opening Quizlet's premium service, Quizlet Teacher, for free to all users who have an account registered as a teacher. Quizlet made its first acquisition in March 2021, with the purchase of Slader, which offered detailed explanations of textbook concepts and practice problems, and eventually incorporated it into its paid platform, Quizlet Plus. In November 2022, Quizlet announced a new CEO, Lex Bayer, the former CEO of Starship Technologies. In March 2023, Quizlet started to incorporate AI features with the release "Q-Chat", a virtual AI tutor powered by OpenAI's

ChatGPT ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...

API. Quizlet launched four additional AI powered features in August 2023 to assist with student learning. In July 2024, Kurt Beidler, the former co-CEO of

Zwift Zwift is a massively multiplayer online game, massively multiplayer online cycling and running physical training program that enables users to interact, train, and compete in a virtual world. Zwift was developed by Zwift Inc., which was co-founde ...

, joined Quizlet as the new CEO.

References

External links

Official website
{{Spaced repetition Educational technology American educational websites Language learning software Internet properties established in 2007 2007 establishments in California Privately held companies of the United States Multinational companies headquartered in the United States Albany, California

History

See also

References

External links