Expansion Capital for Company Offering a Textbook Substitute

Because rising costs for higher education have impacted textbooks as well as tuition, the founders of Boundless saw this as an opportunity to start a business. The company now has $8,000,000 of new capital from investors to fund expansion. Previously, Boundless had acquired $2,000,000.

Boundless presents a substitute to high-cost textbooks for college students. This is accomplished by delivering free content online. Information is gathered from open education resources and assembled into study materials based upon student assignments.

No excerpts from copyrighted material are used. Content is assembled only from the free open sources. The result is marketed to students as an option that displaces expensive textbooks. Boundless expects to add more subjects after initially covering only biology, psychology, and economics.

Of course, students can directly access open information. But Boundless improves that experience by organizing and structuring the content. This service has created over 600 free online open textbooks. Neatly arranging and sequencing information into study guides is the value Boundless is adding for users of free resources.

However, free online content is not always a perfect substitute for textbooks in all cases. Boundless is faced with constantly creating new material that corresponds with course outlines provided by students. The Boston company is responding to this challenge by obtaining new funding. A resulting commitment by investors confirms the potential for success by Boundless.

Even still, precise correlation with classroom teaching is not always possible. This may leave students with at least the necessity of pooling their funds for a textbook to share. Nevertheless, Boundless reduces reliance on textbooks as a sole reference that each student constantly needs at hand. This has brought some lawsuits from textbook publishers. Boundless seems protected by staying away from copyrighted sources and simply providing a service to organize content that’s already available for free.