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Codecademy Takes in $40 MM Series D Round Led by Owl Ventures
By Henry Kronk
February 23, 2021
The online learn-to-code platform Codecademy announced on February 23 it had signed a Series D funding round worth $40 million. The company says it plans to use the funds to scale its consumer- and business-facing operations overall. It also plans to expand its presence in India and other growing markets.
The round was led by Owl Ventures, a venture fund that maintains a focus on edtech. The Series D brings the company’s total funding to just under $100 million, according to Crunchbase. Two previous investors also joined the round: Prosus and Union Square Ventures. The former led Codecademy’s $30 million Series C, while the former led the company’s $2.5 million Series A.
Codecademy Announces Series D Following a Strong 2020 and a Period of Sustained Growth
The company says it has been picky in terms of investors it is willing to work with following its last round in 2016.
“We have ambitious goals to help hundreds of millions of people access our learning platform and unlock the skills they need to lead better lives,” said Zach Sims, CEO and co-founder of Codecademy, in a statement. “While we have seen tremendous success on our own, we are excited to accelerate our growth even further by partnering with Owl Ventures, whose unparalleled experience and expertise in edtech will help us surpass our goals and make Codecademy the premier technical learning platform for consumers and businesses globally.”
The Company Plans to Use the Funds to Scale Its Services and Expand Into Emerging Markets
The latest funding arrives following a period of sustained growth at the company. It has reported positive cash flow for the past two years. 2020, however, marked a record year for the company. During that twelve-month period, it gained 5 million new users, 150,000 individual Codecademy Pro subscribers, and 600 business clients.
Following the outbreak of Covid-19, the company offered over 200,000 scholarship subscriptions to students and recently laid off or furloughed workers.
“Codecademy has been on our radar for a long time, as one of the early, long-standing leaders in online learning,” said Amit Patel, managing director of Owl Ventures. “We could not be more excited to help the team continue its impressive growth trajectory and deliver its mission to empower the world with technical skills.”
Featured Image: “Zach Sims, Co-Founder, Codecademy & Bobbie Johnson, European Correspondent, GigaOM @ LeWeb London 2012 Central Hall Westminster-0672” by LeWeb14 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
“As bots enter the classroom, both teachers and learners will have to reflect on their uses and outcomes. They will need to adopt an awareness of AI’s presence. Teachers must recognize AI’s short comings, such as inherently developing biases and its inability to process human emotions.”
This statement is correct as it relates to AI, generally; however, it assumes that AI exists as THE entity that students directly interact with. There are many potential expressions of AI, including a human-in-the-loop approach, in which it is configured in such as way as to facilitate dialogs and interactions between people, either studentteacher or studentstudent.
For example, we’re building an L2 language speaking practice app (Language Hero Smart Chat). We use AI to enable beginning students, who speak different languages, to have natural, real life conversations in each other’s language from Day 1. They speak directly to each other, interacting with the system only to select from multiple content choices suggested by it, designed to facilitate a real free-ranging dialog resulting in real bonding, to the extent it’s possible, rather than to practice a particular lexical structure (they can also text or go off the grid to have pure video chat).
Teachers can use this system as well for group chat. They can upload their own curriculum as well (the Smart Chat system configures it as multiple vector (branching script) chat or merges it with the system curriculum (focused on real life useful topics like travel, food, shopping, social chat, expressing ideas, etc.). Everything they say is comprehensible to their students, and so are all student responses.
When such a system is implemented in a manner that pays particular attention to the affective components that make human interaction so effective for creating the desire to learn (and corresponding openness to processing L2 content, in this case), we think it can be a more effective tool than bot chat.