Startups

Career Karma raises $10M to connect students to coding bootcamps

Comment

Image Credits: AlexSecret / Getty Images

As edtech churns out more and more MasterClass copycats and coding bootcamps, it’s becoming glaringly obvious that students need better ways to navigate the crowded world of online learning.

Career Karma, founded in 2018 by Ruben Harris, Artur Meyster and Timur Meyster, wants to help. The startup is bringing a pick-and-shovel play to the coding bootcamp world: instead of creating its own up-skilling curriculum, the startup empowers students to find the best bootcamps for their price point and career goals.

In plain words: Career Karma is not competing with Lambda School, but instead it’s serving as a top of funnel student matchmaker to Lambda School and other bootcamps.

For as remote education drags on, students are unenrolling from school held on video conferencing software and opting for alternative programs. General Assembly, for example, saw enrollment in career-changing immersive programs is up 20% in the first half of 2020 versus the first half of 2019, as well as 330% growth in live online classes between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020.

Harris sees the shift toward short-term credentialing as positive news for the startup, since its customer base — coding bootcamps — are enjoying positive tailwinds. Despite early COVID-19 layoffs, Lambda School raised $74 million. Coursera, a massive open online course provider, raised $130 million for its short-term credentialing product. Other bootcamps Henry and Strive School launched and successfully raised seed rounds.

Henry picks up cash to be a Lambda School for Latin America

Career Karma’s next iteration will focus on becoming a “core habit that people use on a daily basis.” The roots are already in motion: Career Karma has been growing from a matching tool into a wraparound service over the past year.

After a student gets into a coding school, Career Karma puts coders into small peer mentorship groups, called Squads, to give students support during the program and into the job search process. Instead of acting as a teacher, it wants to be the upperclassmen that helps the younger students understand the right resources and paths to take.

Career Karma is working in one of coding bootcamps’ blind spots. A common critique of coding bootcamps is that while they help students get their first job, the credential might not do as good of a job as a degree in future career mobility. To offset this dynamic, coding bootcamps can invest in alumni programs or community features, such as Career Karma, to strengthen their pool.

Currently, Career Karma only makes money one way: it charges a fee to bootcamps when it successfully places a student in one of their programs. The fee is usually 10% of a placed-student’s tuition, which could range from $10,000 to $50,000, Harris says. It’s worth noting that a school pays Career Karma up front no matter what financing option the student chooses, taking money out of their marketing or admissions budgets.

The biggest hurdle for Career Karma was stress-tested in the early innings of the pandemic: Because the startup is so closely dependent on coding bootcamps doing well, what happens to coding bootcamps in a bear market? When unemployment was high, coding bootcamps were threatened because it took away their ability to successfully place graduates into jobs.

“It did affect us,” Harris said. “But now everybody is back to rapidly skilling their workforce,” given the nature of venture-backed startups. Career Karma’s customers have placed coders into jobs at Stitch Fix, Tesla and Gemini.

Despite only one way to monetize, Career Karma has been profitable for the past five months, and has grown revenue 20% monthly. While Harris declined to disclose specific figures, he did say that over the past year, Career Karma has placed more than 3,000 people into job-training programs. If I’m doing my math correctly, it means that Career Karma could have brought in between $3 million and $15 million in top-line revenue this year alone.

Lambda School raises $74M for its virtual coding school where you pay tuition only after you get a job

“Once we create a platform where workers regularly receive career advice to advance their career, no matter what skill set they want,” he said, “we’re able to charge more.”

Today marks Career Karma’s next big growth push. The startup announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A, led by Initialized Capital.

Initialized Capital’s Kim-Mai Cutler, who previously worked at TechCrunch, said that she doesn’t view Career Karma as solely about bootcamps.

“It’s clear and has been obvious for some time that people will need continuous education to re-skill and re-train throughout their entire careers and the traditional education system hasn’t supported that,” she said. The firm’s Garry Tan coached Harris on how to get into Y Combinator, so when it came time to raise the Series A round, the collaboration made sense.

Other investors in this financing include Lattice’s Jack Altman, Collab Capital’s Jewel Burks and Moz’s Amira Yahyaoui.

“Now we’re able to not just be a player that matches people to bootcamps, but also to trade schools, colleges, universities, and really build a community that goes beyond just a matching platform,” Harris tells TechCrunch.

The founding team behind Career Karma.

More TechCrunch

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

4 hours ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

6 hours ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation