Quizlet is a multi-national American company that provides tools for studying and learning.[1] Quizlet was founded in October 2005 by Andrew Sutherland, who at the time was a 15-year old student,[2] and released to the public in January 2007.[3] Quizlet's primary products include digital flash cards, matching games, practice electronic assessments, and live quizzes. In 2017, 1 in 2 high school students used Quizlet.[4] As of December 2021, Quizlet has over 500 million user-generated flashcard sets and more than 60 million active users.[5]
Quizlet was founded in 2005 by Andrew Sutherland as a studying tool to aid in memorization for his French class, which he claimed to have "aced".[6][7][8] Quizlet's blog, written mostly by Andrew in the earlier days of the company, claims it had reached 50,000 registered users in 252 days online.[9] In the following two years, Quizlet reached its 1,000,000th registered user.[10]
Until 2011, Quizlet shared staff and financial resources with the Collectors Weekly website.[11]
In 2011, Quizlet added the ability to listen to content using text-to-speech.[12] In August 2012, it released an app for the iPhone and iPad and shortly afterward one for Android devices.[11]
In 2015, Quizlet announced raising $12 million from Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Venture Capital, Altos Ventures, and Owl Ventures to expand its digital study tools and grow internationally.[13]
Quizlet hired Matt Glotzbach as CEO in May 2016 and launched a redesign in August 2016.[14] Also in 2016, Quizlet launched "Quizlet Live", a real-time online matching game where teams compete to answer all 12 questions correctly without an incorrect answer along the way.[15]
In 2017, Quizlet created a premium offering called "Quizlet Go" (later renamed "Quizlet Plus"), with additional features available for paid subscribers.[16][17] Glotzbach announced in 2018 that Quizlet would be opening offices in Denver, Colorado in 2018, announcing "a big vision at Quizlet to provide the most intelligent study tools in the world, and our expansion into Denver, a city with incredible tech ingenuity, will help us more quickly build the next generation of learning tools used by students everywhere".[18]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Glotzbach announced he was opening Quizlet's premium service, Quizlet Teacher, for free to all users who have an account registered as a teacher.[19]
Quizlet made its first acquisition in March 2021, with the purchase of Slader, which offered detailed explanations of textbook concepts and practice problems, and eventually incorporated it into its paid platform, Quizlet Plus.[20][21][22]
In November 2022, Quizlet announced a new CEO, Lex Bayer, the former CEO of Starship Technologies.[23] In March 2023, Quizlet started to incorporate AI features with the release "Q-Chat", a virtual AI tutor powered by OpenAI'sChatGPT API.[24][25][26] Quizlet launched four additional AI powered features in August 2023 to assist with student learning.[27][28]
