One month after participating in Udacity’s $35 million Series C, German media company Bertelsmann takes another step to strengthen its e-learning portfolio as it announced the acquisition of Relias Learning from private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for an amount in the mid-hundreds of millions USD.
Created in 2012 through a merger of Essential Learning and Silverchair Learning Systems, Relias Learning offers SaaS solutions for the senior care and health services market. The company has over 4.000 institutional clients with 2 million learners who can chose from a library of over 2.500 online courses.
The current CEO Jim Triandiflou will continue to manage the business following the acquisition. The deal is Bertelsmann’s biggest purchase in the U.S. since the acquisition of publisher Random House in 1998 and comes just shortly after the media company acquired the full ownership of Europe’s largest printing and publishing firm Gruner + Jahr earlier this month.