AirTree Ventures and Sydney education technology investment firm Five Sigma have co-led a $100 million investment round in enterprise training platform company Go1.
The round increases the valuation of Brisbane-based Go1 to more than $2 billion.
Go1 remains a rising star in global enterprise training at a time when some education technology businesses are experiencing slowing growth of demand for their services as the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic and faces new economic constraints.
Other investors in the round are SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which led the company’s $200 million last round in July 2021; Salesforce Ventures; US firm Blue Cloud Ventures; Perth-based Larsen Ventures; Scott Shleifer and John Curtius from New York-based Tiger Global; Brisbane-based individual investor syndicate TEN13; Microsoft’s venture fund M12; Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group; SEEK Investments (ASX: SEK); and Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator. Go1 went through the Y Combinator program in 2015.
Go1’s platform brings together content from dozens of other training providers including Blinkist, Thrive, Skillsoft, Pluralsight and Harvard Business Publishing. This enables Go1’s customers, which range from online video provider TikTok to government agencies, to select a varied range of training material without having to sign up to multiple providers.
According to chief executive and co-founder Andrew Barnes, Go1’s revenues, customers and end-user learners have all doubled over the last 12 months and it now has around five million learners taking courses through its platform.
To date, most of Go1’s growth has been organic but following the new funding it is likely to consider more growth by acquisition. This would help the company accelerate a move into non-English speaking markets. It has already made one such acquisition, French-Swiss education technology B2B start-up Coorpacademy, in April.
Go1 already describes itself as the world’s largest learning hub and it plans to further entrench itself in the field in future by providing content affordable to individual subscribers.
For the present, however, it sees plenty of potential in the corporate market.
AirTree co-founder Craig Blair said: “Companies are embracing the opportunity to programmatically upskill, reskill and empower their workforces and Go1 has emerged as the go-to provider of learning content to make that opportunity a reality. We’re delighted to be a part of Go1’s global journey in building an enduring company at the helm of the learning and development ecosystem.”
Image: Learning online using the Go1 platform.