Online learning courses have begun to take full flight. There are a number of offerings on the market that range from instructional videos from amateurs to professionally-made courses that offer certifications—some for a price and some for free. One e-learning company recently received a generous amount of Series B funding for its continued presence in the market.
Pluralsight is the name of that company, and it reported last week that it had received $135 million in Series B venture funding. According to analysis of the issue at Network World, this latest influx of funds comes on top of a successful $27.5 million in Series A funding the company received last year. This time around, Venture Partners, Iconiq Capital, and Sorenson Capital led the charge in investements for the startup. CEO Aaron Skonnard spoke about how his company will use Series B continue its growth.
"Pluralsight is at an inflection point, and this [Series B] funding will exponentially fuel our growth in the enterprise space, providing businesses with innovations in interactivity and measurable learning outcomes," Skonnard said.
The company offers video-based courses that focus on technology concepts such as coding and operating systems. The listing of the most popular courses on the Pluralsight website includes JavaScript, C#, JQuery, Java, Python, Windows Server, and ASP.NET. There are courses that range from teaching the fundamentals to teaching the advanced aspects of those topics.
Packages that users can purchase come in a range of plans. The most basic starts with only Web-based access through Web browsers or smartphone apps and costs $29 per month. Exercise files, assessments, certificates, and offline viewing is available for an extra $20 per month. Users who want yearly access can also pay for annual subscriptions that come in at $299 for the basic plan and $499 for the advanced.
Pluralsight is one of many options in the online learning market, including other well-known brands such as Codeacademy and Lynda.com. A recent study predicts that the global massive open online courses market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 56.61 percent over the next four years through 2018.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
