Kodland (Codland)

Kodland (Codland LLC online school programming) is for children from 8 to 17 years old with an interactive programming platform and an internal social network one called HUB.

History

2022: Raising $9 million

January 11, 2022 it became known about the investment of $9 million in Kodland. According to the press service of the online programming school for children, the Redseed venture fund invested the most in the startup as part of the funding round.

In addition, Baring Vostok, Kismet, Flyer One Ventures and partner I2BFAlexander Nevinsky invested in Kodland. The total amount of funds received by the startup from investors reached $11 million.

Kodland Team

The funds raised will be used to launch new products, scale in English-speaking countries and enter Spanish-speaking countries and several countries of Southeast Asia.

By January 2022, about 1 thousand teachers work on the Kodland platform, according to its own, and 16 thousand students are registered. The Kodland website presents eight main courses for different ages - creating sites and games on Unity, basic and advanced Python, etc. Courses cost from 3640 rubles to 62,080 rubles, depending on the chosen course and its duration. Courses are available in the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, CIS countries, Malaysia, Indonesia and Argentina. The school develops courses separately for each region in which it operates.

According to the company, the main advantage of Kodland is interactive training with a result orientation. During the classes, the guys develop commercial sites, launch blogs, create their own games and upload them to Google Play or the App Store, they added there.

The managing partner of Redseed, Evgeny Belov, noted that it is difficult for traditional educational institutions to keep up with the rapid pace of technological development in the modern world, as a result of which there is a gap between supply (graduate skills) and demand (employer requirements). Kodland is working to eliminate this gap, he added.^[1]

2020: Attracting $1.5 million of investments

The Kodland school of programming with online lessons for children attracted $1.5 million in investments. Alexander Nevinsky, partner of I2BF Global Ventures, as well as a European venture fund, whose name was not disclosed, participated in the round. This was announced on December 17, 2020 by TAdviser in Kodland. Investments are planned to be spent on testing product and marketing hypotheses in the CIS countries and on product development in English-speaking countries, Spain and India.

Russian online programming school for children Kodland attracted $1.5 million in investments

As of December 2020, Kodland's main geographical focus is the Russian-speaking market: 60% of the audience from Russia, 20% from Kazakhstan and another 20% from other countries where Russian-speaking families live.

Kodland offers real-time lessons with teachers and its own browser platform, on which children program during classes and do homework. There is an additional opportunity on the Kodland platform: teenagers can publish the games they created, play them in multiplayer, team up and fight each other in their own applications. The school's popular courses are Python Basic, where they teach the basics of programming and game development, and Project Informatics, where students learn the basics of working with documents, create their own applications and sites using designers, study the basics of 3D modeling and graphics, and at the end present their first startups.

Kodland was founded by Alexander Nosulich and Oleg Kheifets, who met while studying at the HSE. Alexander was responsible for attracting customers and sales, and Oleg was engaged in the development of courses using strong technical knowledge of Data Science and Python. As of December 2020, the key team consists of specialists with experience in Google, McKinsey and Accenture, and their average age is below 24 years. In addition, Kodland has more than 200 teachers for December 2020.

Teachers have a tremendous influence on the results of the company's development, so we are looking not just for good programmers, but also for those who know how to teach children. We actively hire students of technical universities of 3-4 courses who were counselors in the camps, participated in student events and understand how to communicate with adolescents. The second type of teachers that we teach older children in complex disciplines are teachers of IT specialties in colleges and universities, explains Alexander Nosulich, founder of Kodland.

The last six months have eased many barriers in the minds of parents and accelerated the development of e-learning. According to HolonIQ, the EdTech market will grow 2.5 times over the next 5 years, and global spending on online education will reach $404B until 2025. The Kodland team prioritized online direction long before the pandemic and continues to take advantage of the opportunities. In the near future - to develop the existing small English-language segment, test hypotheses and scale. We believe that a flexible B2C business with a history of operational adaptation and transition from offline to online will continue to meet the latest EdTech trends and grow significantly faster than key major competitors, commented by Alexander Nevinsky, partner of I2BF Global Ventures.

2019: Increase the number of pupils to 7,000

Since 2019, the team has almost completely shifted its focus to the development of online learning, which led to an increase in the number of students from 100 to 7,000 and the growth of the company by 14 times per year.

2018: Foundation

The startup was founded in Russia in 2018 as an offline school for novice developers with classrooms in 9 cities.