Social learning platform Degreed closed a $40 million debt facility with AllianceBernstein and raised $35 million in equity funding from existing investors Owl Ventures, Jump Capital, Signal Peak Ventures and GSV Accelerate.
The company said it will use the financing to continue product development, fund international expansion and further develop its capabilities in skills analysis, integration, data science and client enablement. Since its founding in March 2012, Degreed has raised more than $152 million.
Degreed claims to have doubled its sales over the last year. During that time, it also merged with and integrated Pathgather, which had been its largest competitor. Today its clients include Imperial Brands, Ericsson, Boeing, Unilever, TELUS International and Cognizant. Immediately after the Pathgather merger, Degree’s headcount stood at just over 230.
.@Degreed closed a $75 million in financing for product development, international expansion and new capabilities in skills analysis, integration, data science and client enablement. #HR #HRTech Click To Tweet“This additional capital will allow us to further execute on the roadmap and commitments we laid out at the beginning of the year,” said CEO Chris McCarthy. “We are doubling down on our skills product and the data science and machine learning capabilities to support it.” In addition, McCarthy said, “we will continue to invest heavily in our industry-leading client enablement teams.”
In particular, McCarthy seemed excited for the opportunities Degreed may find overseas. “The market is only accelerating globally,” he said. “Today, 20 percent of our revenue comes from outside the United States.”
Read our January 2018 interview with Pathgather founder and CEO Eric Duffy,
now Degreed’s vice president of product strategy.
Degreed’s approach is combine internal learning content and subject matter expertise with publicly available courses, videos, books, articles and podcasts, then add data and machine learning technology to provide individuals and organizations with the tools, analytics and feedback to make the most use of them. Its aim is refocus learning on employee skills by connecting all of an organization’s learning systems into a single “ecosystem” that leverages unified data to produce more effective methods of training workers in needed skills, thus increasing engagement and retention.
Last year, Degreed raised $42 million in Series C funding round led by Owl Ventures and Jump Capital. Founders Circle Capital, GSV Acceleration Fund and Signal Peak Ventures also participated in that round. At the time the company reported three consecutive years of 100 percent revenue growth. Today, the company said the growth pace is continuing.
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