With the EUR 12.5 mln capital raised so far in total, Codecool matches up in investments with top European actors on the IT education market (Ironhack: EUR 22 mln, Le Wagon: EUR 16 mln). At present, the programming school operates campuses located in Hungary, Romania, and Poland, and more than 1,000 of its graduates work in tech across Europe.
“The investment enables us to continue our European expansion. We’re planning to enter two new markets this year – we consider Austria, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Our target is to operate more than 10 Codecool campuses by 2025,” says CEO of Codecool József Boda. “Expansion, however, does not only mean increasing the number of our schools. Further developing our corporate re- and upskilling courses are also in our focus. Our experience shows that executives are increasingly open to train or reskill their existing employees, as it is often time-consuming and costly to find new experts with appropriate skills on the labor market.”
At the same time, Codecool is also continuously extending the range of its open courses. In addition to its full-stack course with a job guarantee, specialized 3 to 4-month online IT courses were added to the portfolio of the school last year.
In line with the demands of the labor market, further training programs are under development, the press release notes.
In 2025 the target number of graduates from the programming school will increase to several thousand per year.
“Codecool supports a fundamental, long-term macro and labor market trend – the promotion of digitalization and the increasing significance of programming skills – through a unique and flexible business model. This model puts equal emphasis on the training of high-quality coders, and the fast and effective satisfaction of corporate demand for human resources. These, together with the regional coverage and the expansion plans make this company especially attractive for Integral Group and its investors, as education is one of our key focus fields," concluded investment executive of Integral Venture Partners, Ádám Szalai.
“In offering 12-month long intensive and practice-oriented programming courses, Codecool has currently no competitor in the Hungarian market. The method is proven: 98% of the more than 1,000 Codecool graduates have already landed an IT job” highlights Ábel Galácz, CEO of Lead Ventures, funded by MOL and MFB invest (which are also founders of Enter Tomorrow venture capital fund). According to the investor, Codecool's market outlooks are even brighter considering that Hungarian higher education cannot deliver the necessary number of IT professionals, even with an increased capacity.
“As the very first institutional investors of Codecool, we have known the team for years now, and our trust in them has always been very strong. They were able to react quickly and effectively during the pandemic, which is the essential characteristic of a successful scale-up. And they are a key player in EdTech (education technology), which is one of the hottest sectors today. Impacted by the recession, a lot of people feel the need, or are even actually forced in some unfortunate cases to start new careers and further develop their skills. Consequently, we strongly believe in further growth," added Zsolt Mihály, investment manager of PortfoLion Capital Partners.
In the Fall of 2020 Codecool, together with leading large, multinational corporations like Amazon Web Services and Adecco, started the development of a new, EU-level software development skills strategy and curriculum, as founder of European Software Skills Alliance.
Last year, the achievements of Codecool were also recognized by a top IT forum: the Amsterdam-based The Next Web listed Codecool among the 20 most exciting European companies on its Tech5 list collecting the most promising scale-up companies.
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