Online education upstart Udacity is getting more money, putting it into the ever-increasing club of unicorns. The company has now announced, that it has raised a $105 million series D funding at a Billion plus valuation.
The announcement comes as the company celebrates one year anniversary of its nanodegree program. The series D round was led by international media, services and education company Bertelsmann. Scotland’s Baillie Gifford, Emerson Collective and Google Ventures joined in as new investors. Previously existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Drive Capital also participated in the round.
Following this round, CEO of the Bertelsmann Education Group, Kay Krafft, will join Udacity’s board.
The company has recently been quite busy with expanding its reach into the international market. For instance, we saw the company grow towards Egypt and India in the last few months. In fact, according to a report, 30 percent of its users are based outside the US.
Our mission at Udacity is to democratize education making it affordable and accessible to billions of people around the globe to get the jobs they want to improve their lives. While we have made great strides, we have a long way to go in reaching our goal,
wrote Udacity president and COO Vish Makhijani.
This latest round values our company at $1 billion, making it an exciting yet humbling moment in our history.
The nanodegree program is one of Udacity’s most appealing features. These nanodegrees are now recognized by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, including Google and Salesforce and many people have been able to use these documents to get amazing jobs in international firms. Over an area of 168 countries, Udacity claims that 11,000 students are enrolled on its nanodegree program.
The company more recently partnered with Google and Tata Trusts to bring these nanodegree courses into India.
Under the partnership, Udacity will offer its nano degree courses to Indian students accepting fees in rupees and will also set up its offices in India. There are seven nano degree programs of Udacity namely front-end Web developer, Android developer, data analyst, iOS developer, intro to programming, full stack developer and tech entrepreneur.
These will be offered in India at $135 per month (approx ₹9,800) of which 50% will be refunded by Udacity after graduation. Each of these programs roughly take 6-9 months to complete and are developed and taught by expert Google instructors from the Google Developer Relations team and will include project reviews, mentorship and career services from Udacity along with the certificate of course completion.
