I started Microverse to help fix some of our world’s greatest challenges through providing access to education, no matter where you live. More than two years later, I’m proud to announce that we’ve raised a $12.5M Series A funding round to continue doing just that. This round was led by Northzone, alongside previous investors General Catalyst, and All Iron Ventures.
Microverse began with the notion that while talent is everywhere, opportunities are not. The world as we know it is changing and that change requires incredibly skilled technical talent to help us tackle new challenges in this digital world. The adoption of remote work was inevitable, but this past year has really accelerated that transition. We’ve seen companies transition to fully remote, and choose to stay that way, at a dramatically faster pace, opening themselves to the worldwide talent pool. We’re focused on helping talented individuals around the world prepare for, and connect to, opportunities in that global market.
The last year was an extraordinarily challenging one for everyone, including our students and team. We saw our students face larger challenges than ever before, while global demand for software development continued to grow. This, accompanied by our learnings over the last two years, helped us identify and implement some key updates to Microverse. This investment comes at a pivotal time where demand for those looking to learn to code, and from companies looking for technical talent has never been higher, and we are ready to help bridge that gap.
Alongside their investment, Northzone’s General Partner, Michiel Kotting, will be joining our board. Michiel and the team are well-aligned with our long-term vision and have a deep understanding of our model, so we’re thrilled to be partnering with them to make an even larger global impact.
In addition to Northzone and the incredible funds mentioned above, we’ve had investments from stellar angels from Google, Github, Spotify, and other leading startups in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as well as Erica Brescia, Github's COO, and Kevin and Julia Hartz, co-founders of Eventbrite. I am so grateful to each of our incredible partners who believe in us and our incredibly ambitious mission to help tackle one of the world’s largest challenges.
As we enter this next stage, we definitely have our work cut out for us but we’re excited to continue to grow and improve Microverse. We’re focused on tripling our school’s size over the next year and a half and are going to be doing the same with our team. With ambitious global goals, we’re focusing on making joining Microverse possible for more talented people around the world than ever before.
Our fully distributed team currently is made up of 20 amazing and mission-driven people, who have enabled Microverse to get where it is today. But, in order to help people in every corner of the world and invest in our partnerships, program, platform, and learning model, we need to grow our team.
Over the next 18 months, we’ll be bringing on more support and expertise across our core functions: product, engineering, learning, coaching, marketing, finance, HR, and operations. We’re fast-growing, and tackling huge challenges, with big rewards - seeing firsthand how life-changing our education is for students. If you’re interested in helping shape a better world, where the place people are born doesn’t determine their opportunities in life, take a look at our open job opportunities!
What we’re doing is incredibly unique, revolutionary, and challenging. We don’t charge students anything until they land a job, no matter where they live. There’s a reason no one else is doing it - offering ISAs in every country in the world - it’s a massive and risky undertaking. We’re daring to do what no one else is, to help more people around the world access better opportunities because it’s what we firmly believe in.
With that, comes a lot of risks though. We take on the risk upfront for each and every student we invest in. Once students land a job, most take a few years to pay us back, which means we’re investing in our students upfront for multiple years. So we rely on loans and investors in order to continue offering a no-upfront cost school, investing in thousands of students, and doubling down on our mission.
This financing will help us further our mission by enabling us to hire more team members so we can support more students, improve our product, and grow our school and offering. Additionally, it will allow us to continue to invest in places where no one else will, benefiting people and communities that don’t have access to as many opportunities. It will also enable us to offer stipends to support truly exceptional students who need additional support to be able to finish their education and land a life-changing job.
Don’t get me wrong, while what we do is hard, it’s also incredibly rewarding. Seeing our students land remote roles at global companies like Microsoft, Globant, Huawei, or VMWare, as well as startups around the world, shows us just how much of an impact we’re having. We’ve helped thousands of people of varying backgrounds change their lives through our education. And we’re just getting started.
We’re doing something no one else has dared to do. And we’re on a mission to train and connect 1 million professionals globally to remote jobs by 2030.
Join us – let’s build a better future together.
- Ariel Camus
Ariel is the founder & CEO of Microverse, an online school for software engineers. Read more about Microverse and how it can help you.
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