The Storytelling Book

History

2023: Yandex acquired Skazbuk

Yandex has acquired the Skazbuka platform of developmental games for preschool children. This was reported on September 27, 2023 by Vedomosti.

The deal on the part of the seller was confirmed by the co-owners of the Maltese company Zebrainy Ltd (the service was registered to it) - the founder of Skazbuka Kesha Skirnevsky and a representative of the investment company Prytek. The parties did not disclose the amount of the transaction. According to experts, we can talk about an amount of about 120 million rubles.

"The Storytelling Book"

Preschool children actively consume online content: 83% of children 4-5 years old use the Internet, in the age category 6-8 years old this figure is already 97%, follows from the data of the Kids & Teens study by Mediascope. 39% of children 4-8 years old turn to educational online services with different frequencies.

The total revenue of kidtech companies (specializing in educational technologies for children) in 2022, according to Moscow the city's Innovation Agency, increased by 47.4% to 22.7 billion rubles

"The Storytelling Book" was founded in 2017. The company has developed about 40 games to develop logic, emotional intelligence, as well as reading, counting, drawing skills, and so on. The application worked according to the subscription model. The subscription cost per month was 400 rubles per month.

Due to the restriction on accepting payments on the App Store and Google Pay platforms after the start of a special operation in Ukraine, Skazbuka lost part of its customers due to the inability to renew its subscription, but later the company introduced its own payment system. At the beginning of 2022, 80% of Skazbuki's customers were from Russia.

The representative of Yandex noted that the Skazbuki team will move to work with them, and the platform itself will continue to work under the old name. Tatyana Umryaeva, head of services for children and parents at Yandex, added that already about 6 million families with children under 10 are subscribers to the Yandex Plus service.

The purchase of the Skazbuka platform is Yandex's first deal in the segment of children's services. Previously, the company entered into only content transactions, for example, in 2019 it invested in the restart of Smesharikov^[1]

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