Mail.Ru Group invests in GeekBrains, an online learning platform for developers. GeekBrains has a monthly audience of 500,000 users. Over the last 12 months, the number of registered GeekBrains users has increased from 200,000 to a million. Mail.Ru Group has acquired a controlling interest in GeekBrains; the founders will remain its shareholders and keep on running the company.

Investing in GeekBrains goes in line with Mail.Ru Group’s long history of supporting IT education development. The company creates unique practice-oriented learning centers: on its own (VK University, Technopolis) and in collaboration with Russia's top technology university departments (Technopark at Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Technosphere at Moscow State University, Technotrack at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Technoatom at National Research Nuclear University MEPhI). Moreover, Mail.Ru Group holds a number of events designed to share and inspire the IT community: Russian Code Cup, and VK Cup (international championships for programmers), Russian AI Cup (a championship for artificial intelligence programming), Russian Design Cup (a design contest), and Russian Developers Cup (a competition for web developers, mobile developers and game developers).

“We are dedicated to providing people with opportunities of studying to become skilled IT professionals. By now, over two thousand students have been studying at our learning centers and attending our open courses, more than 40 thousand took part in our Cups. Our online courses and other educational content that we share are very popular, and we are happy that together with GeekBrains we can make education even more accessible. We also believe that online education has a great future and bringing educational programs online has huge prospects”, said Dmitry Grishin, Chairman and CEO (Russia) of Mail.Ru Group.

"We really appreciate that, after thoroughly analyzing online learning market, Mail.Ru Group have chosen our product. For us, it’s another proof that for the last seven years we’ve been headed in a right direction. Our main goal is to modernize learning so that it would be more fitting for the XXI century. IT education today has to be based around practice, working in teams on real projects; employers should be included in the process as commissioners for the whole course. We have many plans for our collaboration. We’ll be continuously enhancing depth and quality of online learning. We’ll expand the range of courses to include new segments. We will experiment with learning formats and methods, to let our students achieve outstanding results. It is going to be really exciting! We are certain that together we can create something truly great and contribute to developing online learning in Russia,” — says Alexander Nikitin, GeekBrains cofounder.

GeekBrains is a learning platform aimed at developers, offering over 50 online courses on web development, mobile and game development, design, SEO, and other topics. The service allows those new to programming study the basics, and helps professionals expand their knowledge and learn some new skills. After completing a course, a student receives a qualification certificate. A course includes video lectures, webinars, assignments, discussions with other students and teachers. A GeekBrains graduate can apply for internship at an IT company or an internal IT incubator, where people work on their startups together. Around 4,000 students graduate from GeekBrains each year, and the total number of graduates is over 7,000. More than 470 000 people have taken GeekBrains’ most popular free course, Programming Basics.