Codecademy Plans Global Code-Teaching Expansion With $10M From Branson, Milner, Kleiner, Index, Union Square

Eric Eldon

Eric Eldon is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch. He was previously the co-founder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold... → Learn More

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012
Screen Shot 2012-06-19 at 12.17.20 PM

Codecademy, the New York startup that wants to teach the world to code, has capitalized on widespread interest by raising a second venture round of $10 million from top investors — Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Yuri Milner — and serial entrepreneur Richard Branson.

It’s been at the right place at the right time. Thousands of people now want to start their own tech companies, but haven’t learned the necessary technical skills. Millions more are finding code useful for their other jobs, anything from setting up form emails to crunching data in spreadsheets.

The startup has evidence that this trend is global. It has racked up around 100 million code submissions already, cofounder Zach Sims tells me, with half its users coming from outside the US. In addition to more hires and other scaling needs, some of the new funding is going towards internationalization. Versions of the site are coming in five of the most popular languages to date, including Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and German. You’ll be able to find them at URLs like codecademy.com/ru (which is already live).


Company: Codecademy
Website: codecademy.com
Launch Date: 2011
Funding: $12.5M

Codecademy is a web-based programming tutorial designed to teach HTML/CSS, Javascript/jQuery, Python, Ruby, PHP, and APIs.

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