French President Nicolas Sarkozy was the first French President to have a Chief Digital Officer for the country. Hired straight from university to fill that role, Nicolas Princen helped boost France to become one of Europe’s hottest digital hubs, helping along the way organise the first eG8 in 2011 in Paris.

One of our Managing Partners at Expon Capital already knew Nicolas, and met with him several times over his tenure at the Elysée Palace, getting to know him personally, and better understanding his passion for making the world a better place.

When we created Expon Capital in 2015, around the key idea to invest only in companies that can have a massive positive impact on the world, Nicolas’ new company in Education seemed a perfect fit, specifically addressing UN SDG goal 4 — Quality Education. As soon as we had our 1st closing done, we reached out to Nicolas, who was not raising at the time and started negotiating an investment in the company. Our team was excited about the promise of e-books lowering barriers to learning by offering immediate access on all screens (including the smartphones), the focus on education, and his magic sauce of incentivised peer-learning. We even used a SAFE instrument, which we never use, to make sure we could join the company’s shareholders and support its mission.

Over the years, Nicolas and his team created a great product, secured millions of book rights with all major publishers, kept adding features such as audio books, dashboards, and expanded target customers from K-12 to universities, etc. They also succeeded in signing up one educational client after the other.

We are proud and happy that Medium announced the acquisition of Glose today, bringing an even larger global distribution to the product (leveraging Medium’s 170 million readers), and helping make the initial mission a faster reality.

This is Medium’s first acquisition in Europe, and Expon Capital’s 3rd exit in 2020 for the Expon I fund (after Verse and Service).

CNN broke the news :

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/14/media/medium-acquires-glose/index.html

More coverage:

medium’s announcement: https://blog.medium.com/medium-acquires-social-ebook-platform-glose-cf2e94485d8

Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/14/medium-acquires-social-book-reading-app-glose/