OREANDA-NEWS. 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).

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.