Lambda School was added to our portfolio last year in August and just after 14 months, it was good enough to raise $14M in Series A funding round. Lambda School is an online training service that aims to produce quality software engineers for competitive market with its 30-weeks full time or 12-months part time training programs. Students are not required to pay up-front for the course and only pay back if they start earning at least $50K per year. If students earn less than $50K per year, they don’t have to pay.

The funding round was led by GV and Stripe also participated in it which raised the total funding amount of Lambda School to $18.1M. Lambda School plans to use these funds for offering more new courses and growing the academy.

“We chose to work with these new funding partners because we all have a desire to fundamentally fix how we teach and train software developers. This new model has proven effective with each of our graduating classes, and we’re grateful to have the support of so many investors who see the value in our approach,” said Austen Allred, CEO and co-founder of Lambda School.

Since Lambda School’s inception in April 2017, over 75 Lambda School graduates have been hired, including 83% of early cohorts, with an average salary increase of over $47,000 per hired graduate. The school hopes to increase the number of students hired as it builds out a more advanced hiring network and continues to adapt its curriculum to teach the skills employers need in new hires today. The growing coding school currently has 700 students enrolled.

“Lambda School’s approach to alternative education democratizes access for anyone aspiring to become a full-stack software engineer,” said Shaun Maguire, partner at GV. “Lambda School’s business model is innovative in their category and the company has scaled rapidly. We’re excited to work with Austen Allred and the team as they continue to bring online software engineering education to more people.”

“Lambda School is expanding access to first rate developer education,” said Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe. “We love programs that spread opportunity to people who have been overlooked and underserved. Enabling more people to take advantage of the possibilities of software and the internet is a pursuit that’s firmly aligned with Stripe’s mission.”

Please read the full story at Lambda.

Enabling complex multi-cloud deployments for enterprises with the power of Netflix and Google developed (and open sourced) Spinnaker, Armory – a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform has got $10M in a Series A funding round led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, Y Combinator and Robin Vasan.

Just added last year to our portfolio, Armory has raised a total amount of $14M by now including this recent Series A funding. Armory is currently offering two Spinnaker options: Open Source Spinnaker for small teams and Enterprise Spinnaker for large enterprises.

When they started the company, the founders made a decision to hitch their wagon to Spinnaker, a project that had the backing of industry heavyweights like Google and Netflix.

“Spinnaker would become an emerging standard for enabling truly multi-cloud deployments at scale. Instead of re-creating the wheel and building another in-house continuous delivery platform, we made a big bet on having Spinnaker at the core of Armory’s Platform,” company CEO and co-founder Daniel R. Odio wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.

The bet apparently paid off and the company’s version of Spinnaker is widely deployed enterprise solution (at least according to them). The startup’s ultimate goal is to help Fortune 2000 companies deploy software much faster — and accessing and understanding CI/CD is a big part of that.

Please read the full story at TechCrunch.

Graduated from YCombinator Summer 2015 batch, a Brisbane based online learning platform – GO1 has raised $10M Series A funding. The funding round was led by SEEK, with participation from Our Innovation Fund.

The basic GO1 platform is free for everyone. Individuals or companies can upload content & create online courses for their customers or staff members and can also manage assessments with sophisticated reports. Not just that, courses can also be hosted on custom domain or a free sub-domain at go1.com. However, special enterprise and support features can be unlocked at $2 per user. Businesses can also go for Premium plans where they can access 1000+ most popular off the shelf courses offered by GO1.

With offices in United States, Australia, United Kingdom, South Africa, Vietnam and Malaysia, GO1 continues to expand its services and operations globally.

The startup reports it now hosts more than 500,000 courses and learning resources, with more than 22 million users across clients including Cricket Australia and Adshel having access to its content. The funding will go towards expanding GO1 into new markets.

With Seek a customer of the startup, the investment follows the companies earlier this year partnering to integrate GO1 courses into Seek’s jobs platform.

This integration sees a job seeker presented with relevant courses from GO1 while going through the job search process; if a role requires a particular educational or training requirement, such as first aid skills for example, a corresponding GO1 course will surface.

Andrew Barnes, cofounder and CEO of GO1, said the funding from Seek is an exciting development for the team, its investors, and training partners.

“Seek is one of Australia’s first unicorns and a stellar success story of a local company having global success. We’re looking forward to deepening our involvement between Seej and GO1.com and look forward to increasing our presence in new markets around the world,” he said.

Ronnie Fink, Seek’s Corporate Development Director, said there are a number of synergies between the two businesses.

“Education and training that helps people up-skill and re-skill to obtain and maintain meaningful employment is increasingly important for people. GO1.com is increasing the accessibility and ease in which people and businesses can access such education and training,” he said.

Please read the full story at Startup Daily.

Added in 2014 to our portfolio, MTailor – a custom clothing company that uses mobile app to take measurements with its special machine learning algorithms, has raised $5.2M in Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures.

MTailor claims that their machine learning algorithms measure with 20% more accuracy than a tailor and that’s done in less than 30 seconds. MTailor takes 7-9 upper body where as 6-7 lower body measurements to stitch custom fit clothes including Shirts, Jeans, Blazers, Tees, Chinos and Dress Pants. All clothes are stitched from Bangladesh. MTailor started with creating clothes for men only however now they are also stitching for women but only limited to Jeans with aims to offer more options in future. Average delivery time for MTailor products within United States is 2 weeks except Suits that take 3 weeks.

Penn, who is the company’s chief executive officer, said, “We used the [mobile] phone to develop the technology. We told people to [have] the phone upright, stand six feet away so it can take a full-length photo and spin around once. Because we were figuring measurements, most of the men would send photos of themselves wearing an Under Armour shirt and shorts. Using AI, from that spin we can build a 3-D scan of the whole body and get a digital measurement on everything from the bicep to the chest measurement and other areas.”

The company is vertically integrated, with manufacturing in Bangladesh and fabric sourcing done locally, although some fabrics are also sourced from China. A typical order is completed in under two weeks, and some items such as shirts can be filled in about a week. Starting price points for men’s shirts are $69; jeans, $69; chinos, $99; dress pants, $169; blazers, $349 and suits, $499. Women’s jeans start at $79.

Keith Rabois, lead partner from Khosla on the deal, said, “Advances in the quality of smartphone cameras now allow anyone to make an accurate scan of their body from their home in under 30 seconds. There is no reason anyone should be wearing off-the-rack clothing, when MTailor can provide professional-level custom clothing.”

So far MTailor has raised $5.6 million to date. The Series A includes $3 million in new money, and $2.2 million in SAFES from a seed investment from Khosla, which was converted to equity in the Series A round. SAFES are a form of debt similar to a loan that are converted into shares of preferred stock when the Series A round is closed. The balance was an initial friends and family raise.

Please read the full story at WWD.

UpKeep, a fully mobile maintenance management software, added just an year ago to our list of portfolio startups has shown amazing growth in a short span of time and has successfully raised $10M funding in Series A round led by Emergence Capital. Well done UpKeep!

UpKeep, which helps technicians create and track work orders, raised a $10 million Series A round led by Emergence Capital on Tuesday. The company also counts Bain Capital, Battery Ventures and Y Combinator as investors.

The company’s high rate of organic adoption is a testament to that competitive edge. UpKeep doesn’t have a marketing budget and the application has been free on the App Store since its inception. The majority of its clients, like Unilever, sought out deals with UpKeep after their workers downloaded and began using the product themselves. That has led to a user base of 50,000 workers across 1,000 businesses, including other major companies like Marriott, Jet.com and McDonald’s. The premium model used by these companies allows employees to collaborate and management to deploy advanced analytics and reporting features.

UpKeep reports that its customers experience as much as a 90% reduction in the time it takes to complete maintenance jobs. Chan, who landed on this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry list, attributes this to the fact that the easy-to-use system is more likely to be adopted and continually used by workers.

The most recent fundraising round has brought the company’s total funding to almost $13 million. In addition to enabling new iterations of the software, Chan hopes to build a collaborative platform for workers to troubleshoot maintenance problems. “We really want to build a community around maintenance,” says Chan. “We have this fragmented industry where they aren’t as online and learning from each other as other industries…. We want to help support those conversations.”

Please read full story at Forbes.