Creative e-learning platform Skillshare bags US$ 66M in funding

New York-based Skillshare has raised US$ 66M in a new funding round held in August 2020, led by OMERS Growth Equity. Existing investors Union Square Ventures, Amasia, Burda Principal Investments and Spero Ventures also participated in the round. OMERS’ Managing Director Saar Pikar will be joining Skillshare’s Board of Directors.

Proceeds from the funding round will be used by the startup to increase its footprint globally as apparently two-thirds of new member registrations are coming from outside the United States, with India emerging as Skillshare’s fastest-growing market.

Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for creative and inquisitive people, on topics including creative writing, music, illustration, design, photography, video, freelancing, and more. Skillshare enables millions of its users to come together to find encouragement and progress in their creative journey.

Michael Karnjanaprakorn and Malcolm Ong started Skillshare in 2010. While Cooper plans to remain focused on English content for the near future, he noted there are other steps Skillshare can take to encourage global viewership, like accepting payments in different currencies and supporting subtitles in different languages.

CEO Matt Cooper said that Skillshare’s usage has grown significantly since the coronavirus pandemic struck the whole world in mid-March. That created some challenges, mainly for the more refined Skillshare Originals that the company offers along with its user-taught classes. Originals include a color masterclass imparted by Victo Ngai, a class on “discovering your creative voice” taught by Shantell Martin and a creative non-fiction class by Susan Orlean.

But on the brighter side, the ensuing lockdown led to a lot of people having free time at home and finding constructive ways to spend it. Cooper also said that since the company’s rebranding in 2019, new membership registrations have tripled.

Skillshare has continued producing Originals by sending coaches “a huge box of equipment” and then administering the shoot remotely. Cooper remarked in a statement that this has “opened up a whole new world” for the Originals team, enabling them to “identify parts of the world where they perhaps weren’t going to fly a camera crew to go shoot.”

The startup presently has 12M registered users, 8K teachers and 30K classes priced at US$99 a year or US$19 a month. Saar Pikar ( MD, OMERS Growth Equity) was quoted to say “Skillshare serves the needs of professional creatives and everyday creative hobbyists alike, which presents a highly-innovative value proposition for the online learning market.”

The new funds are also going to be used by Skillshare to invest in developing its Skillshare for Teams enterprise product, which enables clients like GM Financial, Vice, AWS, Lululemon, American Crafts and Benefit to offer them as an incentive to their employees.

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