Codecademy Raises $2.5 Million To Teach You How To Code

The term “hot startup” gets bandied about pretty frequently. But there are few companies it applies to more than Codecademy, a startup which, of all things, teaches you how to program. Today, the company is announcing that it’s raised $2.5 million from an all-star roster to continue that mission.

The $2.5 million funding round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from O’Reilly AlphaTech, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Social + Capital Partnership (Chamath Palihapitiya), Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), CrunchFund, Collaborative Fund (Craig Shapiro),Joshua Schacter, Vivi Nevo, Dave Morin, Sam Altman, Ruchi Sanghvi & Aditya Agarwal, and Naval Ravikant. It also includes GroupMe founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci — which is notable because Codecademy cofounder Zach Sims was a GroupMe employee shortly before leaving to help start Codecademy.

Since it launched last August, the site has become what’s (probably) a global hit. It has users in more than 200 countries, only 30% of which are in the United States. The company has declined to share its current user count, but it had 200,000 within their first 72 hours, and I’ve heard whispers that they’re still doing very, very well.

I’ve tried the service out myself and love it. It introduces programming in a way that’s surprisingly friendly, and the in-browser code editing bypasses the frustrations of setting up your first IDE.

Codecademy originally started off with a batch of lessons created in-house, but it’s just started to roll out user-submitted lessons as well. Their first one? A course on Javascript functions by USV partner Albert Wenger, which will be available here shortly.