Skillsoft, a global leader in corporate digital learning, has just announced it entered into an agreement to acquire Codecademy, a leading online learning platform for technical skills, for approximately $525 million.

Codecademy is a popular learning platform that provides high-demand technical skills to around 40 million registered learners in almost every country worldwide. The platform offers interactive and self-paced courses in 14 programming languages across multiple domains like application development, data science, cloud, and cybersecurity. What is more, the Codecademy platform can rapidly expand to deliver new skills at scale, making it highly adaptable to the evolving technical needs of learners and their employers. Codecademy was founded in 2011 and is led by a proven entrepreneurial team that has built one of the most admired technical skills learning platforms in the industry. Jeffrey R. Tarr, Chief Executive Officer of Skillsoft, commented:

“Codecademy will significantly expand Skillsoft’s capabilities in the high-growth Tech & Dev segment. Strategic acquisitions are an important part of our growth strategy. We acquired virtual instructor-led training capabilities with Global Knowledge and coaching with Pluma earlier this year. With the addition of Codecademy’s innovative capabilities, we will create an even more immersive online learning experience. When we combine Skillsoft’s enterprise customer base of more than 12,000 corporate customers and over 46 million learners with Codecademy’s 40 million learners, sophisticated digital marketing capability and influential brand, we expect to unlock significant revenue synergies.”

The Codecademy team joins Skillsoft to help further build out the leading technical skills training solution for learners globally. Zach Sims, founder, and CEO of Codecademy, noted:

“Since our founding, Codecademy has been focused on empowering our learners to build inspiring careers in technology. We have helped tens of millions of people around the world learn new technology skills. Together with Skillsoft, we will have the opportunity to rapidly increase the size of our content library and scale Codecademy across the millions of learners and thousands of companies – including approximately 75% of the Fortune 1000 – that work with Skillsoft worldwide. With additional resources and opportunities to drive growth, we are excited to embark on this important next chapter.”

Here are some of the Strategic Rationale and Benefits of this acquisition:

• Creates a Leading Technology & Developer Offering. Adding Codecademy’s expertise in 14 programming languages across multiple domains to Skillsoft’s existing technical skills offering will create a leader in the high-demand, high-growth Tech & Dev segment. In addition, the capability of the Codecademy platform to rapidly add new programming languages and technical skills at scale will further enhance Skillsoft’s ability to meet the evolving demands of learners worldwide as it helps organizations address the critical technical skills gap.

• Expands Immersive Platform with New Ways of Learning. Skillsoft has already assembled an expansive set of learning options, including virtual instructor-led training, coaching, micro-videos, audio, books, boot camps, live events, assessments, and badges. Together with Codecademy’s interactive, self-paced courses and hands-on learning, Skillsoft will be able to deliver even more immersive experiences through its AI-driven platform, Percipio.

• Creates Substantial Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities by Adding a Strong Brand and Powerful Digital Sales and Marketing Engine to Global Enterprise SalesForce. The acquisition will bring together Codecademy’s sophisticated direct-to-learner digital sales and marketing engine and Skillsoft’s enterprise sales organization, creating new opportunities to upsell and cross-sell across each company’s customer base, which is expected to drive customer growth and revenue synergies.

• Expected to Be Significantly Accretive to Bookings and Revenue Growth Immediately Upon Closing. Codecademy is expected to deliver approximately $47 million in bookings and approximately $42 million in revenue for the calendar year ended December 31, 2021, up 23% and 31%, respectively, over the prior year. Codecademy is entirely a SaaS business and is expected to deliver gross margins of more than 85% in 2021 and be accretive to Skillsoft’s gross margin immediately upon closing. Codecademy is investing to fuel growth and, accordingly, is expected to generate a negative EBITDA of approximately $20 million in 2021. Skillsoft expects it will accelerate Codecademy’s growth in its first year of ownership and that the acquisition will be accretive to EBITDA over the long term.

The fiscal Year 2023 Outlook

Skillsoft reiterates its full-year fiscal 2022 outlook provided on December 14, 2021, with bookings in the range of $700 million to $720 million; adjusted revenue in the range of $685 million to $700 million; and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $165 million. The Company will provide a fiscal 2023 outlook, pro forma for the acquisition when it reports its fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 results.

According to Stack Overflow, this acquisition will enable it to continue to operate as an independent company, but with the backing of a “global technology powerhouse”. Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, wrote in a post:

“Prosus is one of the world’s leading technology investors with stakes in companies such as Tencent, Brainly, BYJU’s, Codecademy, OLX, PayU, Remitly and Udemy.  Their massive scale and reach improve the lives of around a fifth of the world’s population. Prosus’s mission is to build leading companies that empower and enrich communities, as demonstrated by the many community-focused and EdTech companies they work with. This makes Prosus the perfect company to acquire Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow the ideal investment in their focus on the future of workplace learning and collaboration.”

Chandrasekar went on to explain that the acquisition will provide the company with more resources and support to grow its platform on a global level. For instance, it sees deeper partnerships, international expansion and M&A opportunities in the future. Prashanth Chandrasekar also added:

“Our intention is for our public platform to be an invaluable resource for developers and technologists everywhere and for our SaaS collaboration and knowledge management platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking institutional knowledge.”

Larry Illg, CEO of EdTech at Prosus, commented:

“With enduring skills shortages and ever-evolving needs within technology organizations, technology training has emerged as the largest and fastest-growing segment of corporate learning and development. As an operator of businesses across 90+ countries, we understand the needs of technologists and developers, particularly in high-growth markets. In addition to further scaling its community in the markets we know well, we want to help Stack Overflow Teams to expand within enterprises to address an underserved opportunity to transform their technology learning and collaboration.”

According to Prosus, it decided to acquire the developer community because of its popularity within the developer and technologist community, as well as for the company’s knowledge management and collaboration solution Stack Overflow for Teams.

Since 2011, Codecademy has been a leader in online coding education, helping over 50M learners from 190+ countries unlock in-demand technical skills to improve their careers and livelihoods. The company has been cash-flow positive for over two years and has consistently grown in new users and revenue. In 2020 — a year defined by the sudden need for accessible, interactive online learning — Codecademy saw its largest uptick in sign-ups and bookings yet, with over five million new users, 150k paid subscribers of Codecademy Pro, and 600 customers of Codecademy for Business.

Codecademy has been highly selective about raising capital, closing its last Series C round in 2016. While investor interest in the company and edtech category has been at an all-time high, it was the opportunity to partner with Owl Ventures, the largest edtech-focused venture capital fund, that drove Codecademy’s decision to take on additional capital. Zach Sims, the CEO and co-founder of Codecademy said:

“We have ambitious goals to help hundreds of millions of people access our learning platform and unlock the skills they need to lead better lives. While we have seen tremendous success on our own, we are excited to accelerate our growth even further by partnering with Owl Ventures, whose unparalleled experience and expertise in edtech will help us surpass our goals and make Codecademy the premier technical learning platform for consumers and businesses globally.”

Amit Patel, the managing director of Owl Ventures added:

“Codecademy has been on our radar for a long time, as one of the early, long-standing leaders in online learning. We could not be more excited to help the team continue its impressive growth trajectory and deliver its mission to empower the world with technical skills.”

Recent developments at Codecademy include:

• CFO Hire: In November 2020, Codecademy welcomed its first-ever CFO and C-Suite hire, Adam Goldman, who brings over 20 years of edtech and SaaS experience, most recently as the head of Chegg’s textbook business. Adam will oversee growth for Codecademy and build its corporate development function.

• B2B Launch: Codecademy launched its first B2B product, Codecademy for Teams, and saw 350% growth in bookings after its first year in beta. Codecademy will continue expanding B2B offerings, including bespoke learning and onboarding experiences for organizations.
• COVID-19 Impact: At the onset of the pandemic, Codecademy launched initiatives to expand online coding education for people in need. Through a student scholarship program and worker support campaign, Codecademy donated over 200k free memberships to students and laid-off or furloughed workers.

In a recent tweet you share with us that you were once a fast food server and now a Front-End-Developer. What is your story of success?

I came across Codecademy by pure chance when in February 2017 and learned the basics of Python before quitting because I didn’t know what I was doing to be honest.

I wasn’t exposed to computer science at any point of my life, mainly because we all assumed my academic strengths were just in English and history.

After my brief dalliance with Python, I continued working in retail but I felt like I was destined for a different life. I viewed retail and fast food as a stepping stone while I was trying to figure out what I truly wanted to do.

I went back to learning how to code in the fall of 2017 using Colt Steele’s Web Developer Bootcamp (not an actual bootcamp), a Udemy course. I started building projects, tweeted my journey using the #100daysofcode where I shared my failures and successes while learning things such as php and Javascript.

I utilized countless resources from YouTube (subscribe to Traversy Media, Kevin Powell and Coding Phase for motivation and project tutorials!!), Egghead, Medium, FreeCodeCamp, etc . Over time, you learn to bookmark MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) and CSS Tricks as reference points. I attracted the attention of a few employers who liked my work and hustle. July 18, 2018 was the day I got my first legitimate offer as a web developer and relocated to Seattle, WA from Orlando, FL. It was an amazing moment for me. In my first role we used Angular and PHP. Now I’m settled into my 2nd position as a contract frontend engineer where we work with Vue, React and Laravel.

Today I hope this serves as motivation to those #codenewbies/ #100DaysOfCode devotees that it can happen.

Pic on the left was January 29th, 1st day as a fast food server. $8/hr. Every day I walked home & coded for hours.

Pic on the right is me as a dev, first day was July 29th pic.twitter.com/BcuYaYydUK

— Tae’lur Alexis ⚛️🦄 (@TaelurAlexis) October 1, 2018

What are your favorite coding languages, tools, platforms etc?

I love writing code in JavaScript. My framework of choice is React! Favorite text editor is VS Code, I love how they have Git built in so I can make commits, pull branches, and push code up to GitHub seamlessly all in the editor.

You were at #MSBuild. What are your thoughts and what did you learn? What your favorite session?

Microsoft Build was truly an experience! I was there as a Dev MC which is sort of like a brand ambassador where I attend session and create videos recapping what I learned! I also interviewed the team at Microsoft Edge about user experience. Overall I learned more about the changes they’ve made to the Edge browser, their commitment to accessibility and user feedback, their acquisition of GitHub and overall all of the latest innovations happening there. My favourite season was on Cortana and the Bot framework, basically you’re able to have a casual chat with Cortana and the bot will create, update and cancel events on the fly and answer any questions you have. It was truly amazing.

Microsoft Build 2019 was truly an experience. The amazing connections I made, topics I learned, & even @ArlanWasHere following me on here 😩 was surreal. I’m thankful to @J_Mignano & the rest of the dope team for giving me the opportunity to invade this space! pic.twitter.com/M1QjaDF2YN

— Tae’lur Alexis ⚛️🦄 (@TaelurAlexis) May 9, 2019

How do you motivate people to start coding with CodeEveryday? What inspired you to start this project?

I’m always willing to recommend coding resources that I’ve personally tried and found effective! I’m transparent about the journey I’ve had learning how to code and securing jobs in tech. And because of that, people ask for mentorship, guidance, official list of resources and advice about interviews and jobs. So I decided why not create a platform that’s sort of like a companion to use when you’re deciding what career path you want to pursue in tech and how to interview and prepare to enter the job market? I really want to help empower those coming from non-traditional and underrepresented backgrounds, in a quest to make tech more inclusive.

What do you do in egghead?

When that tweet about transitioning from fast food to engineering went viral, Joel (the founder of Egghead) asked me if I’d like to collaborate and be an instructor. I’m working on what to put out right now so stay tuned! But basically I’d create coding-related tutorials!

What are your thoughts on girls in the software industry. In your opinion, is there an equality problem in the IT companies? 

Inequality as far as treatment of women in tech or the number of women in it? The answer is yes! There are many women who’ve made countless accomplishments but they’re subjected to harassment and unfair treatment due to their gender. The solution is to amplify marginalized voices, support and empower each other and help create opportunities and share our resources and network so everyone has a fair chance.

What is the most inspiring tech person that you’ve met so far?

The most inspiring tech person that I’ve met so far is Stephanie Hurlburt. She’s become a really good friend and she’s always given really great advice on everything, especially how to navigate tech and the issues that arise.   There’s so many others too that have helped me both directly and indirectly.

What other projects are you currently working on (or have intentions to work on in the future)? What technologies are you using in the development process?

I’ve released my first course! Partnering with Jyrone Parker, we’ve come out with an online workshop called, “React + Laravel Masterclass” where you build a Cash app Clone. It’s a progressive web app and you’d be able to connect your stripe account to send and receive payments. So now that that’s been released,

I’m mainly working on the first release for CodeEveryday. At the moment we’ll use React, Node and Apollo-GraphQL because that’s the tech stack I’m most familiar with, . I’m making it a progressive web app so you can view the webpages offline or if you’re experiencing network connectivity issues. My concern is also accessibility, making sure the user experience is the main priority from the beginning and not an afterthought. I’m also working on conference talks I have for the summer where I’ll be educating people on how to make their React and React Native apps more accessible! I’ll be at conferences like RefactrTech in ATL, Chain React in Portland and React Loop in Chicago. I also have a weekend vlog series called, #CodeEveryday where I recap everyday life as a software engineer and start up founder. My YouTube channel is youtube.com/user/taeluralexis.