Go1, an enterprise learning and development platform, has raised $100 million, at over a $2 billion valuation, to fuel its growth.
The funding — which was closed in May — was co-led by AirTree Ventures and Five Sigma, and saw participation from SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Salesforce Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Larsen Ventures, Scott Shleifer and John Curtius from Tiger Global, TEN13, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Madrona Venture Group, SEEK, and Y Combinator.
The Brisbane-based EdTech unicorn has now raised $400 million to date. It last raised $200 million in a Series D funding round in July 2021 led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, AirTree Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, taking the company’s total value to more than $1 billion.
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, including Blinkist, Thrive, Skillsoft, Pluralsight, and Harvard Business Publishing, and helps them find the right resources for all their professional development, compliance, onboarding, and training needs.
Commenting on the development, Andrew Barnes, Co-founder & CEO, Go1, said,
"Right now our learners come to us through their employers, but we want to have a relationship outside of that context. That is dovetailing with another ambition. Internally, we are considering how to provide education to everyone without pricing them out. If we do something in consumer, we would want to make that a target. It would be quite a different product."
While most of its growth to date has been organic, the company said it will be using some of the funding potentially to bring some inorganic growth into the mix. It’s already doing some of that. In April, it made an acquisition of French-Swiss B2B EdTech startup Coorpacademy to expand deeper into francophonic markets.
Go1 also plans to use some of the funding to further explore how it might extend its platform beyond corporate learning as well, and also bring more technological innovations into its platform.
Craig Blair, Founder at AirTree Ventures, said in a statement,
"Companies are embracing the opportunity to programmatically upskill, reskill and empower their workforces, and Go1 has emerged as the go-to provider of learning content to make that opportunity a reality. We’re delighted to be a part of Go1’s global journey in building an enduring company at the helm of the Learning & Development ecosystem."
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 has some 5 million learners taking courses through its platform. Last year, it claimed 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 has some 150,000 pieces of content available in its library, provided by over 1,000 publishers and creators from across the world.
