Polish edtech scale-up Coding Giants has announced a funding round of €3.5 million from CEE-based investors PortfoLion and Nunatak Capital.
Lead investor Budapest-based PortfoLion has previously invested in several edtech companies such as Novakid, CodeCool, and SDA. Nunatak Capital are a Polish VC fund specialising in the areas of data science and AI.
Coding for kids and teenagers is big business, with Nova1Advisor reporting the size of the educational programming industry for children and teenagers is to reach $8 billion by 2027. The pace of change in technology requires education programmes to keep up with future demand, and have our youngsters prepared to future proof their careers.
“Coding has the potential to be one of the most in-demand skills in the next decade despite digital education lagging far behind where it should be. That's why learning how to code is a unique opportunity, even in the traditionally strong edtech industry. Coding Giants takes an exceptional approach in this field and has all the necessary attributes to become a decisive player on a global scale,” says Zsolt Mihály, Investment Manager at PortfoLion.
Coding Giants offers courses for students 7 to 19 years old, in over 120 stationary locations in addition to online courses throughout Poland and 14 other countries. Aside from its own operations it also offers a franchise model which is currently at play in 12 countries including Croatia, Bulgaria, Mexico, Australia and UAE.
Europe make up the lion’s share of current customers with only 5% from the Latin America region, and 5% from other regions. It has seen its growth in Spanish-speaking countries triple due to a focused effort – a continuous key objective.
“Along with the general development of the company, we want to speed up growth on foreign markets. In Spanish-speaking countries, we have proven that we are able to implement our business model, expanding at a rapid pace,” the founders of Coding Giants say. “Now we wish to accelerate expansion even further, which would be difficult to achieve without the support of external funding. We are interested not only in financial resources as we have gained partners who have experience in the development of educational start-ups in global markets.”
Coding Giants has over 77 courses and over 500 lesson plans for students which include Scratch, App Inventor, Python, C#, JavaScript and HTML - with a goal of increasing trainer numbers to 1000 by the end of the year. Funding will also be allocated to the development of the proprietary LMS system with innovative gamification and AI modules supporting education.
“Data Science solutions, especially those based on AI algorithms, are increasingly being used in the edtech sector. The analysis of data from Coding Giants' learning management system on student behaviour will enable the identification of learning styles, level of motivation to learn, commitment to current tasks, and an accurate diagnosis of knowledge gaps,” says Adam Purwin, Nunatak Capital.
“With the increased acceptance of remote forms of communication due to COVID-19 and ubiquitous internet accessibility, we are witnessing a revolution in education, which is becoming more and more personalised and profiled to students' individual preferences,” he adds.
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