Already about halfway through a year of “unprecedented” growth, popular online education startup Skillshare announced Monday it closed on a $66 million funding round led by OMERS Growth Equity.
With a host of classes covering everything from UX design and photography to business analytics and marketing, Skillshare aims to both educate and foster communities. Every class has a project, and when users complete it they get feedback from both the instructor and their fellow students. The idea, says CEO Matt Cooper, is to work alongside others with a common interest.
“We want Skillshare to be more than just a passive media platform,” Cooper told Built In. “We have a strong belief in learning by doing, and having a way to put this knowledge to work and feeling great about what you produce is an important component.”
Right now Skillshare has 12 million members, 8,000 teachers and more than 30,000 classes. The company rebranded at the beginning of the year and, since then, new member signups have tripled and existing members are watching three times the number of lessons.
This kind of growth is true of several other platforms in the online learning space due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Widespread lockdowns and stay-at-home orders have forced much of the world inside and online. Now more than ever people are turning to sites like Skillshare to fill their time and expand their skill sets.
“What we hear from users is they are coming to us during a difficult time as a source of community, interaction, and stress and anxiety release,” Cooper said. “Our view is the pandemic accelerated trends that were already well underway. Things like working from home and online learning have been growing rapidly for some time, but COVID pulled up the timeline for them going mainstream by several years.”
While its illustration, graphic design and fine arts classes remain the most popular, Cooper says the pandemic sparked an increased interest in classes related to stress relief and, incidentally, at-home hair cutting — “needless to say, she saw a lot more volume in her classes than she did pre-COVID.”
This $66 million, plus the $28 million closed a couple years ago, brings Skillshare’s total funding raised to more than $116 million. The money will be used to expand internationally and create more opportunities for the site’s teachers, including more student engagement and marketing efforts. Cooper also says the company is hiring, with plans to beef up its product and engineering teams. These positions will be available in both Skillshare’s hometown of NYC and throughout the country as the company moves toward a fully remote work model.
