13 Jan Bringing programming education online, Thinkful raises $4.25 million
Thinkful, the online continuing education services company for programmers and developers, has raised $4.25 million in a new round of funding as it looks to expand its portfolio of education offerings.
“We’ve found a away to get a lot of professional engineers excited about helping people learn,” says Darrell Silver, who, along with Thiel Fellowship recipient Dan Friedman, founded the company in October 2012.
Connecting professional programmers and developers with students online, Thinkful operates like a lighter weight and cheaper version of the developer bootcamps and professional education companies that had cropped up over the past few years, according to Silver.
“You see a lot of students learning online much more effectively online and much more cheaply and that’s noteworthy. And it’s because of these experts working with these students,” Silver says.
Unlike a bootcamp, which can run in the $15,000 range for a three month program, Thinkful online education classes cost about $1,000 to $2,000 over the same period, and there’s no need to relocate or suspend work while a student learns, Silver says.
It’s a similar model to one that companies like Treehouse use for its own online education curriculum.