Seed investment of 8.5 million from Greylock Partners, GSV Ventures, and Cowboy Ventures underscores urgent need to upskill technical workforce
SAN FRANCISCO — CoRise today officially launched its live online upskilling platform to help businesses and individuals acquire the cutting-edge technical skills necessary to remain competitive in today’s market. The CoRise platform features live online courses from top industry experts, a rich community of peers, and leverages technology to deliver high-quality education with real career outcomes at scale.
“The world economic forum estimates that over 1 billion jobs will be transformed by technology, with machine learning and data science among the domains leading the charge. But the demand for top talent in these technical areas is outpacing supply.” said Julia Stiglitz, CEO and Co-Founder, CoRise. “This growing skills gap has forced organizations and individuals to choose between high-cost live training for a select few, or scalable, self-paced platforms that struggle with engagement. CoRise is on a mission to break this trade-off, creating scalable but impactful training that allows professionals to acquire the most in-demand skills.”
CoRise was founded by Julia Stiglitz, Sourabh Bajaj, and Jacob Samuelson. Combined, the founding team has deep experience in education and machine learning at such companies as Coursera, Google Brain, Teach For America, GSV Ventures, and Neeva.
CoRise combines world-class instructors with the power of a community of students and technology to drive career outcomes for learners at scale. Benefits and features of the platform include:
- Courses. Live, cohort and project based courses taught by industry experts from leading-edge technology companies.
- Community of practice for peer to peer learning and support.
- Personalization. CoRise will leverage technology and advances in AI to ensure student success—identifying who needs help, when they need it, and in what form.
Already students from over 500 companies like Spotify, Lyft, Electronic Arts, and Walmart, have completed courses and are learning the skills they need to accelerate their careers. Course completion rates on CoRise are 78 percent, compared to the average asynchronous course completion of 3-6 percent. 94 percent of learners say the skills they learned from their CoRise courses will help them succeed in their jobs. Additionally, forward looking organizations are using the platform to upskill their workforces.
“CoRise had the best results with our employees of any learning platform that I have ever used,” said Rebecca Scales, Head of Technical Learning and Development, Noom, and former Head of Technical L&D at Expedia. “Technical training has become a business imperative and with that I need solutions that drive real outcomes. CoRise is on the cutting edge of learning, and I am thrilled to be partnering with them.”
“The only way to provide relevant, meaningful, and up-to-date learning for rapidly changing skills is through dynamic learning systems that combine world-class live experts, communities of practice, reinforcement technologies, and real-world, customized application,” said Karie Willyerd, former CLO of Visa and advisor to CoRise.”CoRise has designed a magic combination to make it possible for companies to build their own technical talent with measurable completion and capability results.”
Fueling CoRise’s progress and success to date is $8.5 in seed funding round lead by Greylock Partners and GSV Ventures, with participation of Cowboy Ventures as well as Mustafa Suleyman, Cofounder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, and Greg Brockman, Cofounder of Open AI.
“CoRise is in the vanguard of a key evolution in workforce digital learning as it moves to ‘must have’ delivery. Enterprises are desperate to fill highly skilled technical jobs and employees are demanding pathways to career mobility and job satisfaction,” said Deborah Quazzo, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of GSV Ventures. “CoRise brilliantly addresses each side of this equation delivering a social learning experience for acquiring high end technology skills. In doing this, they are achieving industry leading outcomes for employer and employee in a model that will ultimately reach millions of learners. At GSV we believe this scaled workforce learning with a purpose is the future.”
“Effective upskilling is a massive need for companies and a huge opportunity for the global workforce,” said Sarah Guo, Board Partner at Greylock. “CoRise’s unique platform leverages social and supercharges instructors with technology and AI. This allows them to deliver results at scale. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with them to drive greater economic opportunity.”
“Corporate learning is moving far beyond ‘libraries of courses’ to focus on technical and business capabilities for the future,” said Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst. “CoRise’s unique combination of experts, communities of practice, and personalization is precisely what companies want, focusing on what we call the Capability Academy model of corporate training.”
About CoRise
CoRise is a live technical upskilling platform designed to arm business and individuals with the latest cutting-edge technical knowledge and best practices. For more information, please visit https://corise.com/
