Back in August, I talked with entrepreneur Jonny Simkin about the sale of HubEdu, his San Diego online college textbook and retailing platform, to San Mateo, CA-based Rafter. Last week, Boston-based SimpleTuition said it had acquired ValoreBooks, another San Diego Web startup that enables students to order more than 18 million titles online.
Financial terms were not disclosed. But I recently talked with ValoreBooks founder Bobby Brannigan, who was among the seven ValoreBooks employees who left San Diego’s perennially mild climate in time to watch the season change in Boston, and I was struck by similarities to the Rafter-HubEdu deal.
Both SimpleTuition and Rafter made their respective acquisitions as part of an expansion strategy intended to reposition each company with a broader offering of products and services for college-age students.
In its statement last week, SimpleTuition said the acquisition of ValoreBooks follows a series of in-house initiatives intended to continue the company’s expansion beyond its initial focus on helping prospective students compare student loans and related financial aid. The company now offers Web-based tools that enable students to also repay their student loans, create an online checking account, and get discount rewards for certain online purchases.
Combined, SimpleTuition and ValoreBooks expect to see more than 10 million unique visitors on their website by the end of 2012.
While SimpleTuition did not announce the
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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