Today, we’re excited to share that we have reached an important milestone in Springboard’s journey. Springboard has raised $31 million in Series B funding, bringing our total capital raised to more than $50 million.
We were in the fortunate position of choosing the investors we work with. We’re delighted to welcome a group of accomplished investors with the long-term vision required to create successful outcomes in education: Mark Sherman and Albert Bielinko from Telstra Ventures, Arrun Kapoor from SJF Ventures, and YB Choi from Vulcan Capital. Most of our existing institutional investors also participated in the round, including Costanoa Ventures, Reach Capital, Pearson Ventures, IFC, 500 Startups, Blue Fog Capital, and Learn Capital — we’re grateful for their continued belief in our mission.
What does this mean for Springboard?
We started Springboard seven years ago with a dream to transform education. The journey so far has been more rewarding than any of us could have imagined. We’ve seen that through our Career Track programs, Springboard is not only transforming education—we’re also transforming lives.
The latest round of funding raised will enable us to double down on student employability in response to the current job market by creating new hiring-focused products and strengthening employer partnerships to help our graduates land their dream careers.
This is more vital now than it has ever been. We are in the middle of the largest global labor market shift in over a century; millions of displaced workers are now looking to make the difficult transition into new, in-demand careers. Our remote-first, mentor-guided model is uniquely positioned to serve not only these individuals but also universities and employers who need help navigating today’s new economic reality.
How is Springboard different?
Since Springboard was founded in 2013, we have pioneered a learning model that has enabled thousands of successful career transitions into the most in-demand technology fields via our 100% online, job-guaranteed programs. Unlike most online learning companies, we focus on employability—this simply means we support our graduates to get hired. Since Springboard was founded, 94% of our eligible graduates secured a job within one year, earning an average salary increase of $26,000.
Throughout this time, our unique strength has remained the same: our human-centric approach to learning. We match each student 1:1 with a personalized mentor—an industry professional working in their chosen field—who provides weekly feedback to keep students motivated and accountable. This approach has resulted in 330% student enrollment growth from June 2019 to June 2020.
Simply put, we value mentorship. Why? Because we know changing careers is tough. We know it means long days, late nights, tough deadlines, frustrating setbacks, nagging self-doubt. We know this is the real road to growth and success, and we want to be there alongside our students every step of the way.
How will Springboard better serve its students and graduates?
The new funding will help us further support our job-seeking graduates. We have several exciting new initiatives planned, including a series of innovative tools that will help our students, including:
- The Hireability Forecaster, a tool that provides early indications of student success and potential employability roadblocks by combining the power of Springboard’s predictive technology and the insights from its global community of almost 1,000 industry mentors. With 80% of Springboard mentors indicating they would hire their mentee, mentors and coaches will have the ability to indicate student achievement and intervene to course-correct if students fall behind.
- Springboard Introductions, a tool that offers Springboard students personalized, targeted introductions, and job referrals from its community of over 13,000 mentors, alumni, fellow students, and employer partners. Candidates who are internally referred are 15 times more likely to be hired than those who apply on a job board.
- Student-Job Fit Recommender, an AI-driven job matching tool that recommends open roles at Springboard’s employer partners and helps match these to students’ unique background and skillset.
Will Springboard also improve its career services and support?
Great question! Furthering our commitment to student employability, we are also expanding our career services. We have tripled the number of virtual apprenticeship opportunities to build portfolio-worthy content and provide real-world work experience.
The career services team has also grown its career coaching capacity by 4x to provide more access to office hours, mock interviews, and a team of placement experts assigned to each student. And, to provide additional support during the job search, we have also extended our professional mentorship after program completion.
In the coming months, we also plan to grow our course offerings outside the high-tech industry to include additional skills gap disciplines. (We recently launched our new Data Engineering Career Track!)
We are also looking to deepen our partnerships with universities and employers—more on that soon! In the meantime, learn more about Springboard and our unique approach to learning and mentorship here.
At the beginning of 2020, as the Springboard team kicked off the year at our annual company offsite in Thailand, we set ourselves an audacious 10-year goal: to transform over one million lives by 2030. Today’s announcement brings us one step closer to that goal. We hope you can come with us on this journey.
Parul Gupta & Gautam Tambay
Co-Founders of Springboard
