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Course Hero Crowdsources Study Material From 2 Million Students Just in time for back to school: an online repository of study guides, flashcards and tutors from over 4,300 universities.

By Marty Jerome

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

CourseHero.com
Based in Redwood City, Calif.
Employees: 23
Number of registered users: 2 million

What It Is
Think of Course Hero as a cozy college study group of 2 million students, minus the bad pizza. The site offers some 7 million crowdsourced study materials from users at more than 4,300 universities, along with video lectures, 24/7 tutors, free flashcards and online courses in entrepreneurship, business and web programming.

How It Started
While enrolled at Cornell University, Andrew Grauer felt the frustration of many undergraduates: Too much knowledge is bottled up in private hard drives and individual brains. "Course Hero is about democratizing access to quality learning materials and services," he says. So he took a semester off from school and founded the company with his brothers David and Jared. Funding for the first three and a half years came from family and friends. When the site reached 1 million visitors a month, it received a $1.5 million round of funding from YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and StubHub's co-founder and former CEO Jeff Fluhr, among others.