Dutch edtech startup Gibbon acquired by Degreed for undisclosed sum

Dutch edtech company Gibbon has been acquired by San Francisco’s Degreed in order to expand the latter's reach into Europe. No financial details were revealed.

Gibbon, founded in 2013, is a platform for creating “playlists” of learning content. Degreed, a learning platform for enterprise and individuals, recently closed a $21 million funding round, grew its staff to 100 and added clients like Microsoft and Mastercard.

Gibbon’s Leiden base will serve as Degreed’s new European office. “We are excited to grow our European efforts from beautiful Leiden. We will continue to build on the team there as well as from our San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT offices,” said Degreed co-founder David Blake.

“Gibbon is the most elegantly designed learning curation service in the world, and their community includes some of the top product and design experts,” he said. “We are excited, both to grow our network of worldwide learners, and to add the Gibbon team’s product, design and engineering capabilities to the Degreed platform.”

“Degreed and Gibbon are chasing the same mission. Joining forces enables our team to focus on what we are most passionate about: Building beautifully simple products that help people and organizations to learn and grow,” said Wouter de Bres, Gibbon co-founder.

“We started Gibbon because we experienced first-hand how rewarding self-directed learning can be. Both Wouter, Joeri and myself have a formal education which has nothing to do with our day-to-day work,” added co-founder Petar Radosevic. “Continuously learning small chunks on the topics of our interest has enabled us to build multiple successful software companies. This merger with Degreed allows us to accelerate the realisation of this vision; one where learning is no longer focussed around a single source of knowledge, but from a collection of micro learnings. Gibbon’s focus on product are a great addition to Degreed’s strong enterprise presence.”

Gibbon user accounts will be moved over to Degreed in the coming months or users will have the option to download their playlists.