PERLEGO

Gauthier Van Malderen did the math every student does and hated the answer. He was spending a fortune on textbooks during his degree, using maybe 10 percent of each one, then watching them gather dust.

Music had Spotify. Video had Netflix.

Textbooks still meant handing a bookshop 50 pounds for a doorstop.

So in 2016 he teamed up with Matthew Davis and built Perlego in London. Both were young Belgians, and neither was a career academic publisher, which probably helped.

The pitch was simple: one subscription, unlimited access to academic and non-fiction books, read in your browser. Gauthier funded the early days himself using profits from a previous company called Iconic Matter.

No big seed round, no famous backers, just a founder who was sure students would pay if the price was right.

The first real outside check came in 2018, when Accelerated Digital Ventures led a 3.5 million pound round. The Spotify-for-textbooks line stuck, and Perlego started signing up publishers one by one.

Perlego works exactly like you would guess. You pay a monthly subscription, around 12 pounds, and you get unlimited access to over a million ebooks.

The catalog is academic and non-fiction, so textbooks, study guides, business books, and professional titles rather than the latest thriller. On the other side, Perlego pays publishers based on how much of each book people actually read.

So a book that gets read cover to cover earns its publisher more than one that gets opened once. For a student, the trade is obvious.

One subscription costs less than a single semester's worth of physical textbooks. That is the entire pitch, and it is a good one.

The core product is the Perlego library, over a million academic and non-fiction ebooks available through one subscription. The in-browser reader is built for studying, not lounging, with highlighting, note-taking, and a citation generator that spits out references in the format your professor demands.

Perlego has added AI study features to help readers summarize and question what they are reading. On top of the individual subscription, there are institutional plans that let universities and libraries offer the whole catalog to their students at once.

Perlego grew by doing the unglamorous work of signing publishers. It struck deals with thousands of academic and non-fiction publishers to build a catalog big enough that students could actually ditch the campus bookshop.

Then it went where the students are. Perlego sells directly to individuals, but it also cuts deals with universities and institutions, which put the service in front of entire cohorts at once.

It layered in study tools too, like an in-browser reader, citation help, and note-taking, so it felt less like a pirate PDF and more like a proper study companion. In 2024 it brought in Sir Terry Leahy, who scaled Tesco into a giant, to help push that growth further.

The economics of unlimited reading are unforgiving, and Perlego's customers make it harder. Academic publishers like their high margins and are slow to hand their catalogs to a subscription service that pays per read.

Meanwhile students are famously broke and famously good at finding free PDFs. Perlego has to convince publishers to trust it and students to pay for something they could probably pirate.

Sitting between those two is a tightrope. Charge too little and the per-read payouts sink the business.

Charge too much and students walk. Every reading subscription lives or dies on that balance, and textbooks are an especially stubborn corner of it.

Perlego started on Gauthier Van Malderen's own money, funded by profits from his earlier company Iconic Matter. Accelerated Digital Ventures led a 3.5 million pound round in 2018.

By late 2019 the Series A had brought total funding to 7 million pounds. The big one came in March 2022, when Mediahuis Ventures led a 50 million dollar Series B.

Then in 2024, Sir Terry Leahy, the former Tesco CEO who knows a thing or two about retail scale, led a 20 million dollar round. Not bad for a company built to save students from 50-pound textbooks.