The 40% cash and 60% stock deal will close in the first half of 2022.
Jonathan Greig is a journalist based in New York City.
Digital learning company Skillsoft has announced a $525 million deal to acquire online education platform Codecademy.
The 40% cash and 60% stock deal will close in the first half of 2022, and Skillsoft said it secured financing from Barclays and Citigroup for the deal. Codecademy brought in about $42 million in revenue in 2021 and has $47 million in bookings for the calendar year. Skillsoft estimates its fiscal 2022 revenue may reach $700 million.
Founded in 2011, Codecademy now has about 40 million users, and Skillsoft plans to incorporate the platform into more Fortune 1,000 companies while also expanding the curriculum.
“Since our founding, Codecademy has been focused on empowering our learners to build inspiring careers in technology. We have helped tens of millions of people around the world learn new technology skills,” said Zach Sims, founder and CEO of Codecademy.
“Together with Skillsoft, we will have the opportunity to rapidly increase the size of our content library and scale Codecademy across the millions of learners and thousands of companies — including approximately 75% of the Fortune 1000 — that work with Skillsoft worldwide. With additional resources and opportunities to drive growth, we are excited to embark on this important next chapter.”
Codecademy currently offers courses in 14 different programming languages covering a wide variety of topics, including cybersecurity, cloud, application development and data science.
Codecademy and other digital learning platforms have increasingly partnered with companies to provide technical courses. Skillsoft CEO Jeffrey Tarr said they “expect to unlock significant revenue synergies” when they combine Skillsoft’s enterprise customer base of more than 12,000 corporate customers and over 46 million learners with Codecademy’s 40 million learners.
“Codecademy will significantly expand Skillsoft’s capabilities in the high-growth Tech & Dev segment. Strategic acquisitions are an important part of our growth strategy,” Tarr said.
“We acquired virtual instructor-led training capabilities with Global Knowledge and coaching with Pluma earlier this year. With the addition of Codecademy’s innovative capabilities, we will create an even more immersive online learning experience.”
Skillsoft added that it plans to incorporate their AI program into Codecademy’s offerings, with the end goal being the ability to “upsell and cross-sell across each company’s customer base, which is expected to drive customer growth and revenue synergies.”
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