NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Natasha Mascarenhas

After going over four years without raising any capital, coding class platform Codecademy has raised a new tranche of money: a $40 million Series D round led by Owl Ventures, with participation from Prosus and Union Square Ventures.

The startup is the latest edtech business to bring on capital after years without it, a list that includes ClassDojo, CourseHero, Quizlet and Udacity. But founder Zach Sims, who began the company in 2011 as a Columbia student, says that Codecademy’s growth, and hunger for new capital, isn’t due to a pandemic bump.

“A lot of that edtech bump came in K-12 and college solutions, or in leisure educational things like MasterClass,” Sims said. “Ours was less pandemic-induced.”