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I expected the deal to be announced sooner or later, having witnessed a casual discussion about the subject between the founder of Dnevnik.ru Gabriel Levi and Runa Capital’s Serguei Beloussov  in a taxi en route to an IDCEE evening reception in November 2011. The deal has finally been announced, and the timing could not have beeen better: this week Russian school kids start their new school year.

Dnevnik.ru is an educational social network that connects students, teachers, parents, and school administrators. Essentially it is a cloud based document management for teachers, a social network for school children and an information resource for parents.

So far Dnevnik.ru connected 21’000 Russian schools (according to Wikipedia there are 54,000 schools in Russia) and 10,000 Ukrainian schools. It looks like it will have more schools to join soon, as the Russian ministry of education has made a decision to roll out electronic journals in schools by 2014, a functionality that Dnevnik.ru offers as a free feature.

It is used by 2,4 million pupils, 337,000 teachers and over a million of parents. It sees 265,000 daily visitors who spend on average 8 minutes on the site.

Here is more information on Dnevnik available in the public domain (an interview with Levi in April 2012 in Russian).

Dnevnik.ru utilizes internet technology for lesson scheduling, grading, homework records, file sharing and communication between the key parties of the school education system, and it is completely free to use. The company is still considering options for traffic monetization, and I won’t go into the specific revenue streams, but it already generates a few million dollars in revenue.

Levi founded Dnevnik.ru in 2009, having been inspired by the learning management system used at the Columbia Universtiy which he graduated from in 2004. Dnevnik.ru connected first schools as early as 2009, and in 2011 the company raised  $1.7 million from Prostor Capital.

As of April 2012 the company employs 120 people. It has subsidiaries in Israel, Hungary, Poland and Ukraine. Dnevnik.ru

Dnevnik’s international analogs include Moodle, Blackboard, Schoology and others. Last year Blackboard has been acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity Partners by $1.6 billion.

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