LeWeb 2012: Branson Backs $10m Codecademy Financing

Code learning service Codecademy has announced $10 million in its second ever financing round, with Richard Branson looking at making a little money out of the young tech company.

Codecademy is hoping to push on after gaining some big name backing, including from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as it looks to boost the number of developers on the planet.

“Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins are joining the Codecademy family with $10 million in our second round of financing,” a blog post from Codecademy read. “They’re joined as well by Union Square Ventures, Yuri Milner and Richard Branson. It’s inspiring to work with both great firms and terrific entrepreneurs like Richard and Yuri.”

Puffing on profit

Co-founder of Codecademy, Zach Simms, was speaking at LeWeb conference in Westminster today, where he faced questions about how he planned to make the service profitable.

“For now, everything on the site is free, but who knows what will happen in a few years,” Simms said. “I’ll let you speculate.”

Simms admitted the company may have to expand its real-world language offerings if it wants to stick to its “scale now and make profit later” strategy.

“With this new funding, we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing. We’ve reached millions of students in more than one hundred countries,” the company added in its blog. “Tens of thousands of teachers that have created Codecademy courses are now able to spread their knowledge all over the world. We want to make that process better for our students and for our teachers.”

Branson has been keen on investing in start-ups of late, having put his money into Facebook rival Path and Square, the mobile payments firm started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

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