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发帖数: 1034 | 1 Posted 3 hours ago by Jonathan Shieber (@jshieber)
Online personal and professional continuing education company lynda.com has
raised $186 million at a roughly $1 billion valuation to go shopping for
education technology companies.
It’s the second mammoth round for Lynda, following a $100 million initial
investment from Accel Partners, Spectrum Equity and Meritech. The new round
was led by TPG, a private equity firm with some $65 billion worth of assets
under management.
For lynda.com, the new round is all about a shopping allowance. The company
already has letters of intent out with three potential acquisition targets
and has several more companies in its sights, according to an interview with
the company’s chief executive, Eric Robison.
One investor familiar with the market for online education said that the
company may look to bring in programming tutorial companies like Thinkful (
which raised a round of funding recently) or Treehouse (which hasn’t).
Lynda.com divides its profitable business between a consumer-facing portal
that allows users to access any of its hundreds of courses in topics ranging
from business classes, to technology training, to creative and design
training.
According to Robison, Lynda.com will look to add another 150 to 250
employees to its roster of 550 current staff members.
Lynda.com has a library of 5,700 classes with 255,000 video tutorials in
English, French, German and Spanish.
The massive funding for lynda.com comes as the U.S. continues to spend on
continuing education. Some estimates put the total annual spending in the
country at $55 billion for adult and continuing education.
An evolving workplace, demanding more technical skills from employees even
in manufacturing jobs, coupled with the high price of a traditional degree
and the continued demand for skilled developers and programmers, have made
education a priority for professionals.
And literally hundreds of education companies have cropped up online (and
offline) to attempt solve some part of the problem and salve the fear among
the professional class.
Now, with the new round, lynda.com has not only girded itself for combat, it
’s received a massive cash pile that it can drop on any fledgling company
in education. |
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