Employers and Higher Education Institutions are using their reach and brands to provide new options for learners, while governments are starting to incorporate micro-credentials into policy, funding, and qualifications frameworks.
By The Numbers
The Problem
The $2.6 Trillion Post Secondary Education and Workforce Market is unbundling. In our view, Higher Education is not going away, but higher education institutions are launching shorter, faster, and cheaper models that fit the needs of employers and the shifting preferences of workers for skills based training.
Now that we have over 10 million open jobs in the United States and 4 million+ people quitting jobs as part of The Great Resignation, employers are beginning to accept alternative credentials while workers are increasingly choosing these pathways to upskill into these roles that are in demand.
The problem is that this landscape is confusing, which is why workers are choosing Career Karma to match them to the right job training program and give them support for the rest of their career.
Career Navigation Software (Product)
We believe it’s important to develop a relationship with the end consumer, so that we can truly support them throughout their career.
With 1 billion people needing new skills by 2030, there’s infinite demand for job training, thousands of schools competing to get access to those people, and Career Karma serving as the sole bridge between workers, schools, and companies in its own category.
We help workers through our product in the following ways:
- Offering the biggest online library of content (reskilling advice)
- Helping workers select the best job training program for them (our marketplace)
- Support workers before, during, and after their training in our live audio rooms (events)
The purpose of [our] technology is to give people a voice, the power to create, and the power to organize. Now, anybody can have that power by creating live audio rooms on the Career Karma platform.
Community Is Our Secret Sauce
These are life changing decisions that people are making and matching people to job training programs isn’t enough to get them to enroll, retain, graduate from job training programs, and ultimately land a job.
Which is why we launched live audio rooms to help people connect to peers, coaches, and mentors that give them the psychological support and social capital they need to achieve their career goals.
Schools and companies are also able to interact directly with people in our community that have questions about their courses or jobs that they are offering.
We have been bullish on audio since 2016, when we launched the Breaking Into Startups Podcast, and now that we are introducing 25,000+ people per month to schools and several of them are landing jobs at companies like Twitter, Lowes, GitLab, etc, we are positioning Career Karma’s Live Audio Rooms as the town square for all career transitioners on the internet
Growth
After closing our Series A last year, we kept in close contact with investors and advisors (shout out to Donnie Bedney – for reference), which led to us meeting Eric McCarthy and Sean Engel from Top Tier Capital Partners, who led our $40 Million Series B Round. Top Tier has more than a decade of experience investing in companies at the mid and growth stages. In addition, Top Tier is a longstanding LP in Initialized – continuing our theme of keeping in the family.
We also spoke with some of our other investors and new investors like GV, Softbank, Kapor Capital, Backstage Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, etc about what we need to do in order to be the Category King of the Rapid Reskilling Movement, and we decided that expanding into higher education and the enterprise was the logical next chapter for Career Karma.
Companies like Amazon, PWC, AT&T, Target, Macy’s, etc are starting to offer education as a benefit to attract and retain workers, so recently Career Karma partnered with one of the largest luxury retailers in North America to offer Career Karma as a Benefit to their employees/contractors and do the same.
These workers want to get skills from bootcamps, but they are also interested in courses offered by higher education institutions which is why we have signed 3 Online Program Managers including 2U as we expand the supply side of Career Karma’s marketplace.
We have a world-class team that is committed to creating the best career navigation software of all time and we are specifically focused on hiring in our Data, Product, Design, Finance, Sales, and Enterprise department (Apply Here to Join Our Team!).
Vision
Our vision is to help at least one billion people in the next 10 years. To help us with that, we invited some awesome angels that have created billion dollar companies like Katrina Lake from SitchFix, Nirmit Parikh from Apna (India’s fastest unicorn), and the Winklevoss Twins.
We want a cap that reflects the world and we want to give a special thanks to all of our Series B Investors below.
Most of our investors are women and people of color and you can see some of them in this video where they share why they invested in Career Karma:
As founders, it still feels like Day 1 when we first bought one-way tickets to San Francisco in 2014. Career Karma has been remote from the beginning and now that we have a team that works in over 20 countries and 9 states, we have personally decided to move to Miami which has a workforce that is particularly vulnerable to changes in automation (50% of Miami’s workforce is in the service sector making $35,000 per year).
We have been talking about How to Prepare Miami for the Future of Work since 2018 and while it’s great that Miami has the largest number of tech workers moving to its city, if the local people don’t get the skills to take advantage of the job opportunities provided by the VC’s and Entrepreneurs that are also moving there, the cost of living will go up and the same gentrification situation that happened in San Francisco will happen there too.
To that end, Saif Ishoof will be serving as a strategic advisor and providing insight on how to navigate strategic partners in Higher Education Institutions, Bootcamps, Workforce Development Agencies, and Employers to prevent this from happening and come up with the playbook that can be replicated in the rest of the nation and all over the world.
For reference, you can see the interview I did with Mayor Francis Suarez about Career Karma’s Series A last year here.
I get a lot of questions about what was going through my mind when I was fundraising, so I created a playlist called “Series B Energy” that you all can listen to hear so that you can feel what it felt like:
"Career Karma entered my life when I needed it most and quickly helped me match with a bootcamp. Two months after graduating, I found my dream job that aligned with my values and goals in life!"
Venus, Software Engineer at Rockbot
Series B Energy Playlist – Press Play
Finally, we hope you had an amazing New Year’s celebration and that you spread good career karma to your loved one’s whenever you all are thinking of reskilling or upskilling opportunities.
We are truly grateful to everyone that has helped us get to this point and special shout out to all of our investors that have believed in us from Day 1.
Why Silicon Valley Venture Capitals Invested $52 Million in Career Karma – Full Videos
Regards,
Ruben Harris, Artur and Timur Meyster
