Brainly

Brainly is a Polish education technology company based in Kraków, Poland, with headquarters in New York City. It provides a peer-to-peer learning platform for students, parents, and teachers to ask and answer homework questions. The platform has elements of gamification in the form of motivational points and ranks. It encourages users to engage in the online community by answering other users’ questions. As of November 2020, Brainly reported having 350 million monthly users, making it the world's most popular education app. 
History.
Initially called Zadane.pl, the company was founded in 2009 in Poland by Michał Borkowski (current chief executive officer), Tomasz Kraus and Łukasz Haluch. The first million unique users monthly was achieved within 6 months after the release. 
In January 2011, the company founded Znanija.com, the first international project dedicated to Russian language speakers. Several other versions in multiple languages for the following markets included Turkey (eodev.com),
Latin America and Spain (brainly.lat) and Brazil (brainly.com.br). 
In December 2013, seven new language versions of Brainly were released, including English (brainly.com), Indonesian (brainly.co.id), Indian (brainly.in), Filipino (brainly.ph), Romanian (brainly.ro) and Italian (brainly.it) sites.
Brainly was initially funded by the co-founders, but then raised funds from Point Nine Capital. 
In October 2014, the company announced that it had raised another round of funding from General Catalyst Partners, Runa Capital and other venture capital firms. The total amount of the investment was $9 million and allowed further product development, as well as the opening of the US-based headquarters in New York City.
In May 2016, another funding round of $18 million of combined debt and equity was disclosed.
In June 2016, Brainly acquired the US-based OpenStudy.
In March or April 2017, Zadane.pl changed to Brainly.
In October 2017, Brainly raised $14 million in the funding round led by Kulczyk Investments. In January 2018, Brainly announced it had acquired the video education start-up, Bask, to bring video technology to the Brainly platform. 
In July 2019, Brainly raised $30 million in a Series C funding round led by Naspers, with participation from Runa Capital and Manta Ray. The total funds raised by the company since its establishment is reported to be $68.5 million. 
In 2020, the company experienced a rapid increase in the number of users, fueled by the global COVID-19 pandemic, from 150 million in 2019 to around 350 million in 2020.
In 2020, numerous users on Art of Problem Solving found that Brainly had compromised the integrity of the American Mathematics Competitions after posting the questions on its website with the correct answers. This led to Brainly updating its honor code.
Website.
General overview.
Brainly provides a platform where students, parents, and teachers help others with homework questions. Students use Brainly to strengthen their skills across subjects such as English, mathematics, science, and social studies. The platform allows them to connect with their peers, subject matter experts, and professional educators to discuss their subjects and seek answers to their questions. Users are asked to provide an explanation and a source for the answers they provide. Questions are categorized by subject, respective of country and school level. (There is no mention of parents, teachers, subject matter experts, helping students in the article cited. Brainly is purely a peer-to-peer platform according to the article. There is also no mention that, "users are asked to provide an explanation and a source for the answers they provide." Instead the article states, "It [Brainly] creates a social learning community in which users must answer questions for other users.")
Gamification.
Each user is given a fixed amount points upon registration, which are used to ask questions. Users can gain points by answering questions posted by others. 
Ranks and Ranking.
Brainly awards "ranks" to users who provide frequent, high quality answers. Some ranks are automatically rewarded for earning a preset number of points or a preset number of highest-quality answers to questions. Users may also apply for "special ranks," which may be awarded for excelling in specific subjects and other criteria. Additionally, the website bestows teacher ranks to professional teachers. 
The website features users who have answered the most questions or earned the most points upon a set of leaderboards. The leaderboards are classified as daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly.
Content moderation.
Brainly is moderated by a community of volunteers and staff, as well as it uses Machine Learning algorithms to filter its Knowledge Base. Moderators are trained users whose answers are excellent in content quality. Moderators are given permissions to respond to users who violate rules, including individuals who plagiarize, post spam, or post assessment questions. Moderators typically have a superior track record of helping others on Brainly.