You're going to need a bigger tree: Treehouse secures $7 million in funding, led by Kaplan Ventures

When we heard that Ryan Carson and the Treehouse crew were calling Portland home, last year around this time, that was pretty big news. Well, now they’ve got even bigger news. To the tune of $7 million.

The funding alone is news. But the fact that an educational juggernaut like Kaplan is getting involved makes it even more important.

“Improving access to education and delivering outcomes-based learning are at the core of Kaplan’s mission,” said Kate Eberle Walker, Kaplan Ventures. “We actively support companies like Treehouse that share in this mission. We believe that Treehouse has the market-leading offering for delivering targeted, in-demand technology skills training at a low cost, and we are thrilled to support their growth.”

What’s Treehouse, you ask? Well, it’s a online platform for learning.

Treehouse stands out from their competition with their full-time teaching staff made up of experienced professionals rather than crowd-sourced content, huge revenue growth, video teaching, coding live in the web browser with Treehouse Code Challenges, and learning by doing with Treehouse Console. Treehouse has also reached the customer milestone of 25,000 active students.

And speaking of students, Treehouse is also in the midst or rolling out another interesting program:

Treehouse is also excited to announce that they are in the progress of launching the first high school pilot program. They are training high school seniors to be job-ready for technology jobs paying $30,000 – $40,000 annual salary without any university degree (or student debt required!). The program runs for 6 months and the total cost of the program is only $9/mo per student.

For more information on the funding and the new high school pilot, visit Treehouse.

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy