Codecademy was founded in August 2011 by Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski. Sims dropped out of Columbia University to focus on launching a venture, and Bubinski graduated from Columbia in 2011. The company, headquartered in New York City, raised $2.5 million in Series A funding in October 2011 and $10 million in Series B funding in June 2012. The latest round of funding was led by Index Ventures. Crunchbase reports an additional Series C round of funding for an undisclosed amount, by Bloomberg Beta in June 2013. On July 22, 2014, the site appeared with a new redesigned dashboard. In August 2015, Codecademy partnered with the White House, willing to host in-person meet-ups for 600 students from disadvantaged women and minority groups over a twelve-month period. By August 2017, Codecademy's CEO Zach Sims officially announced the launch of the new paid "Pro" product. A "Pro Intensive" paid offering was also launched in August 2017 but as of 2020 this product appears to no longer be offered.
Partnerships
In September 2017, Codecademy partnered with Amazon for free Alexa skills training. By October 2018, the company employed 85 people, up from 45 in 2016. It had also raised $42.5 million from groups such as Union Square Ventures and Naspers. By January 2020, Codecademy had expanded to a suite of languages including C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Python, R, Swift, and SQL, as well as various libraries, frameworks, and associated subjects. According to their roadmap, Codecademy is slated to release Android Development, ASP.NET, Flask, Kotlin, and TypeScript courses in 2020.
Features
The platform also provides courses for learning command line and Git. In September 2015, Codecademy, in partnership with Periscope, added a series of courses designed to teach SQL, the predominant programming language for database queries. In October 2015, Codecademy created a new course, a class on Java programming. As of January 2014, the site had over 24 million users who had completed over 100 million exercises. The site has received positive reviews from the New York Times and TechCrunch. As part of the Computer Science Education Week held in December 2013, Codecademy launched its first iOS app called "Hour of Code". The app focuses on the basics of programming, including the same content from the website. In April 2019, Codecademy partnered with Adafruit for a course on electronics and hardware programming. In December 2019, Codecademy launched a new course on Swift, a language developed by Apple Inc. for iOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and more.
Codecademy Pro
On August 3, 2017, Codecademy Pro was released. It has three levels:
Codecademy Pro
Codecademy Pro Intensive
Codecademy Pro Mentors
Codecademy Pro costs $19.99 per month.
Code Year
Code Year was a free incentive Codecademy program intended to help people follow through on a New Year's Resolution to learn how to program, by introducing a new course for every week in 2012. Over 450,000 people took courses in 2012, and Codecademy continued the program into 2013. Even though the course is still available, the program has stopped.
