Go1, an Australian enterprise learning and development platform, has raised $200 million in a Series D funding round, taking the company’s total valuation to more than $1 billion.
The round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, AirTree Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures with participation from others including Blue Cloud Ventures, Larsen Ventures, Scott Shleifer and John Curtius from Tiger Global, and TEN13. Previous investors, including Microsoft Corp’s venture fund M12, Madrona Venture Group, SEEK, and Y Combinator, also contributed to the round.
The Brisbane-based company plans to use the new funding to create new partnerships, expand its portfolio of product offerings, and grow its physical presence globally.
Go1 allows businesses to provide on-demand remote training and education materials to employees. It offers them unlimited access to thousands of learning resources from providers around the world and helps them find the right resources for all their professional development, compliance, onboarding, and training needs.
Launched in 2015 to become a learning and professional development resource for organizations and a critical distribution partner for content providers, Go1’s easy integration and breadth of content have led to widespread adoption on both sides. Corporations now have a single subscription for all workplace training needs, and corporate learning content creators now easily find their way to a larger audience.
Commenting on the latest development, Andrew Barnes, CEO of Go1, said in a statement,
“The support and funding that Go1 had received in its lifetime have been monumental to the company’s growth thus far. However, this is just the beginning. Expanding in the US will allow Go1 to better engage, communicate and support customers and partners, especially as they consider a new hybrid work model. As society transitions out of the pandemic, ensuring that employees have opportunities to explore learning and development resources will be essential for team retention and encouraging employee growth within the organization.”
Go1’s content aggregation approach reimagines corporate education, enabling organizations to utilize learning, training, and certification content from a variety of resources via its platform or by integrating it into their existing learning systems. The company currently helps over 3.5 million people in their learning and development journey. It claims to have increased its user base by more than 300% year-over-year, catering to more than 1,700 customer organizations around the world. Go1 currently has some 150,000 pieces of content available on its library, provided by over 1,000 publishers and creators from across the world.
Nagraj Kashyap, the Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisors, commented,
“When people think about music, they often think of Spotify and access to unlimited music for one subscription. We believe Go1 is the emerging category leader in providing a similar experience for corporate learning…. With premier education providers such as EdX, Coursera, Skillsoft, and Harvard as part of Go1’s subscription, organizations can curate learning content to fit the needs and interests of its workforce. We are delighted to partner with Andrew and the Go1 team to help advance their vision of reaching one billion learners.”
With the latest funding, Go1 has raised more than $280 million to date. The company had last raised $40 million in Series C round in May 2020 from SEEK, Madrona Venture Group, Salesforce Ventures, and M12. Based out of Brisbane, Australia, with offices in London, the US, Singapore, and Malaysia, Go1 plans to go deeper into Europe and Asia Pacific markets.
