SoloLearn Raises $5.6M And Reaches Over One Million Monthly Learners
The company will use funds for product enhancement, global expansion, and launch of a career service for the community
SoloLearn, a leading global developer community aimed at making you a better coder through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, announced today the closing of a $5.6 million fundraise led by Naspers through its Naspers Ventures division, with participation from existing investor Learn Capital. The new investment round will help to further accelerate global growth and localization, allow SoloLearn to scale their talented team in Armenia and the US, and launch a new service aimed at helping its community members improve their career choices.
The award-winning app focuses on social learning by providing a highly-engaged coding community with tools to crowd-source coding education in areas where the community is most interested. SoloLearn built its platform with mobile learning in mind and reaches more than 90% of its audience on smartphones, providing “on-the-go” experience appealing to young people today. SoloLearn’s unique platform quickly garnered global traction since its launch in 2014, recently reaching a purely organic growth milestone of over one million monthly active users.
Yeva Hyusyan and Davit Kocharyan created SoloLearn to scale the bootcamp they created in their native Armenia to teach coding to young students, and since then the app has spread quickly with nearly half of its users in the U.S., India, and Russia, in addition to users across Europe and South America. SoloLearn aims to enable coding education through game mechanics, peer-to-peer competition and community code reviews. SoloLearn offers numerous learning tracks, including JavaScript, Swift, Python, C++, and HTML/CSS, plus specialized content related to machine learning, AI, algorithms, and data structures. Each lesson or quiz can be completed in a few minutes, taking advantage of the downtime people spend on their mobile devices.
“We believe there’s always something new to learn when it comes to coding and when that learning is enhanced by gamification and social interaction, there are more reasons to improve and be successful. SoloLearn has been used across the globe by students looking to increase their coding skills and we want to expand further, teaching more students in more regions, and providing more diverse and advanced learning content” commented Yeva Hyusyan, SoloLearn CEO. “We are thrilled to welcome Naspers as our new investment partner given their global footprint and experience in helping to scale businesses around the world.”
“There are many effective ways to learn to code, from traditional education, to coding bootcamps and web-based courses, but now that so much of people’s time is spent on their mobile device, it is natural that coding education would evolve to allow developers to also learn on the go” said Larry Illg, CEO, Naspers Ventures. “With its highly-scalable, mobile-first platform that has successfully crossed borders, SoloLearn impressed us with their level of organic traction and deep user engagement across the globe. We hope to help with their continued international growth.”
“The need to scale code learning is one of the greatest urgencies on the planet across the upcoming decade,” said Rob Hutter, managing partner of Learn Capital. “Meanwhile, smartphone engagement continues to be the strongest growth story in tech, especially for young adults. SoloLearn has pioneered a remarkable, habit-forming service that cultivates deep code literacy and opens pathways to tech careers for members of the Snapchat generation all over the world.”
About SoloLearn – SoloLearn is a social platform to become a better coder as you consume, create, and share bits of code-related content with peers around the world. Unlike other learning platforms, SoloLearn leverages the knowledge and experience of the community for content creation. Thousands of user-generated content pieces are put together to build learning collections and experiences personalized for each user.
About Naspers – Founded in 1915, Naspers is a global internet and entertainment group and one of the largest technology investors in the world. Operating in more than 120 countries and markets with long-term growth potential, Naspers builds leading companies that empower people and enrich communities. It runs some of the world’s leading platforms in internet, video entertainment, and media. Naspers companies connect people to each other and the wider world, help people improve their daily lives, and entertain audiences with the best of local and global content. Every day, millions of people use the products and services of companies that Naspers has invested in, acquired or built, including Avito, Brainly, Codecademy, eMAG, ibibo, iFood, letgo, Media24, Movile, MultiChoice, OLX, PayU, Showmax, SimilarWeb, Swiggy, Twiggle, and Udemy. Similarly, hundreds of millions of people have made the platforms of its associates a part of their daily lives: Tencent (www.tencent.com; SEHK 00700), Mail.ru (www.corp.mail.ru; LSE: MAIL), MakeMyTrip Limited (www.makemytrip.com; NASDAQ:MMYT) and DeliveryHero (www.deliveryhero.com; Xetra: DHER) Naspers is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (NPN.SJ) and has an ADR listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE: NPSN).