The UK’s Meducation, an online education network for medical students and practitioners, has raised $1 million in seed funding. Part of the round — approximately $300,000 — comes from the UK taxpayer-funded Technology Strategy Board, with the remainder being funded by unnamed private investors.
Founded by Dr Alastair Buick and Jeremy Walker, and launched in April 2008, Meducation is aimed at medical students and professionals globally and provides members with access to 30,000+ community resources, including tutorials, videos, images, slideshows and podcasts, to help them develop and maintain their knowledge and skills.
In addition, the site features Question & Answer functionality to enable members to get answers to specific queries from others in the online community. It’s this blend of e-learning and peer support that Meducation reckons sets it apart from competitors.
To that end, Meducation claims a membership of more than 35,000 medical students and professionals worldwide, with 33 percent of medical students in the UK already using the network.
On the startup’s business model, Buick describes Meducation as a “social enterprise” that will “generate revenue from high-income countries with highly developed health services, in order to provide top-quality resources to those working in countries that don’t have money to spend on training for medical professionals.” This essentially boils down to offering premium content subscriptions in select markets.