We’re thrilled to announce Thinkful’s $9.6M Series A led by Owl Ventures, with participation from Tribeca Venture Partners. We’re also welcoming enormous education, product, and community expertise to our board with Amit Patel (Owl Ventures) and Brian Hirsch (Tribeca Venture Partners) joining Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate), Dan and me.
We raised this money because too often Americans’ careers are dictated by where we’re born not ambition and grit. As "career ladders” give way to flexible and self-determined work, Thinkful is your career partner. We’re educating the entire US, creating wealth beyond where it’s already concentrated and for those whose talent is too often overlooked. Talent is everywhere but modern education is often too far away. We can fix that.
We provide the best return on education.
We don’t offer “degrees”. We get you a job. We don’t sell you on some legacy college “brand”. We get you a job. In the rare case when we don’t get you a job (and you work hard), we give you all your money back. In Engineering Immersion we’re pioneering ISAs so you don’t even pay tuition until you get a qualifying and high-enough paying job. We’re founding members of both industry standard initiatives for reporting student outcomes, CIRR and EducationQA.
Students succeed because at Thinkful we’ve banished the classroom, a millennia-old technology. At Thinkful you learn at your speed with 1-on-1 mentorship from an industry expert. It's what allows 60% of Thinkful students to keep their jobs while enrolled.
Students (in the thousands) come to us to for their second or third or fourth careers (and beyond). Employers (in the hundreds) come to us to find incredible, diverse talent. For our first four years we provided exclusively online education. Then, in October 2016, Dan brought some Thinkful students, mentors, alum, and employers together, in person, in Atlanta for the first time. That approach – deep expertise with a #1 online education and over a year of in-person community building – offers clear breakthroughs for both the future of education and partnerships with employers.
We took this funding only after Thinkful reached profitability and fast growth. We did it because there’s a unique opportunity in the next few years to take what we discovered in Atlanta across the US and the world. Not with fancy real estate but with passionate communities of learners and educators. What analog schools spend on bricks we spend on students. We work harder.
Today we have communities in six cities. 2018 will bring something great.