Good morning all and welcome if this is your first letter! š
Last week was huge for a couple of reasons, but the main one was that CourseTech is hot hot hot š„š§Ø. Coursera went for an IPO earlier this year, and that unleashed a series of moves from their competitors, with 2u 'buying' edX! This is similar to whatās going on in pubtech, with mergers and acquisitions all around, happening at least since the ā80s.
š©š»āš«CourseTech and corporate learning moves:
Microverse raised $12.5 million to support people that want to learn how to code and then get a developer job. They are somewhat following the OpenClassroom approach, and a few others that I cannot remember off the top of my head, where they take a share of the studentsā income when these get hired. Microverse focuses on developing countries.
Juno Journey, an all inclusive learning management tool for corporates, raises $19 million to further work on their upskilling employees based on company goals offering.
Virti is probably one of my favorite up-skilling startups! It was in The Timeās best inventions of 2020, and just raised $10 million from a number of VCs and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The app offers virtual and augmented reality training combined with gaming and research into cognitive psychology to prepare workers that have to make quick decisions in emergency-type situations or when they are under a lot of pressure. You cannot really simulate this type of situation in real life until it happens, think about making a mistake during a surgery or who do you treat first during a pandemic. These are exactly the type of challenges that VR can deal with.
š»In other news:
Researchers aspiring to code will be excited about GitHubās partnership with OpenAI to release a tool that predicts what your next line of code. This isnāt new (kite autocompleted python), and it isnāt unexpected either: if you can train an algorithm on all the English text and you get it to write a story, writing code is just more useful as a case study. In this same category of tools for developers, I thought the speech-to-code Serenade was going to have a great future.
Have an absolute blast of a week!