Online education start-up, Udacity, founded by Google roboticist and Stanford Professor, Sebastian Thrun, is the latest ‘unicorn’ in the tech innovation space. Launched by Thrun at Stanford in 2012 as a free online course in artificial intelligence, Udacity raised $105m on its latest funding round giving it an estimated valuation of $1.1bn. It was announced this week that investors, including Fortune and Google Ventures, and new partners Andreessen Horowitz, Drive Capital, and Charles River Ventures have committed total funding of $165m. Udacity, which currently has 11,000 paying students, partners with companies such as Cisco, Google, and Facebook, rather than universities, to develop course work. Baillie Gifford reports that Udacity is growing 30% per month and believes its annual revenue is around $24m.
Online education start-up, Udacity, founded by Google roboticist and Stanford Professor, Sebastian Thrun, is the latest ‘unicorn’ in the tech innovation space. Launched by Thrun at Stanford in 2012 as a free online course in artificial intelligence, Udacity raised $105m on its latest funding round giving it an estimated valuation of $1.1bn. It was announced this week that investors, including Baillie Gifford and Google Ventures, and new partners Andreessen Horowitz, Drive Capital, and Charles River Ventures have committed total funding of $165m. Udacity, which currently has 11,000 paying students, partners with companies such as Cisco, Google, and Facebook, rather than universities, to develop course work. Fortune reports that Udacity is growing 30% per month and believes its annual revenue is around $24m.