The Flatiron School Raises $9 Million In Series B Funding

The Flatiron School, an educational platform aimed at getting young kids and adults comfortable with programming, has today announced the close of a $9 million Series B funding round led by Thrive Capital with participation from CRV and Matrix.

The idea behind Flatiron School is that anyone, young or old, can learn to code over the course of 12 weeks, to the extent that they could go out and get a programming job afterward. In fact, Flatiron School says that out of its adult program, 99 percent of its students are placed in technology jobs at major tech companies (like Google, Intel, etc.) upon graduation.

“When it comes to education, you can either scale or you can maintain quality, but doing both at the same time is really difficult,” said cofounder Adam Enbar. “We’re being very deliberate in the way that we size our programs and select candidates so that we can continue focusing on quality outcomes for our students.”

But again, The Flatiron School isn’t just for adults. In 2013, the company expanded its offering to high school students and is working with schools to offer programs after school, license out the curriculum, etc.

Computer Science represents one of the biggest changes to a student’s average curriculum in decades, and Flatiron School wants to be the one to create the infrastructure for this type of education, finding a balance between drag-and-drop systems that don’t provide real coding education and abstract Computer Science courses that teach the language without context.

“It’s much easier and more effective to train a teacher to be a programmer than it is to train an engineer to be a teacher,” said Enbar. “That’s the biggest bottleneck because there simply aren’t teachers ready to teach computer science, so we’re investing heavily in training teachers.”

Flatiron School raised $5.5 million last summer.

You can learn more about The Flatiron School here.