Coorpacademy, a startup based in EPFL’s Innovation Park, has completed a 10 million euro round of financing. The company specializes in online training for companies, and its plans now include expanding more quickly in Europe and doubling its workforce in the next 18 months.
In its offices in EPFL’s Innovation Park, Coorpacademy has been working on an online training platform for companies since 2013. It raised 3.2 million euros just a year after it was formed, and it now took only one round of financing for the company to bring in 10 million euros from Serena Capital, NextStage and Debiopharm Investment.
Coorpacademy was launched by three successful entrepreneurs – former executives at Google France and an entrepreneur in the digital domain – and now has 300,000 users. Multinationals, sports and humanitarian organizations and SMEs can call on its services when they need to stay on top of the many changes taking place within their walls, such as technological innovations, the energy revolution and new ways of managing and working. Coorpacademy draws on the latest training innovations like gamification (learning through games), flipped instruction (learning at home in order to spend classroom time on activities) and collaborative learning. The online software it develops helps a company’s employees, networks and even clients keep pace with a changing business environment.
With these new funds, Coorpacademy plans to create around 10 jobs in Lausanne, where it is preparing to hire marketing and R&D specialists in support of the company’s collaborative relationship with EPFL’s research labs. The company also plans to hire in France and other key European countries, with its workforce likely to double in the next 18 months. The additional financing may also be used to pay for external growth, such as acquiring companies specializing in EdTech – education technologies.
One of this startup’s major growth vectors is expanding its platform’s training features in the area of automatic learning and, more broadly, artificial intelligence. For this, it will expand its collaboration with EPFL’s Center for Digital Education. The MOOCs developed by this center, with over 1.4 million registered users, make EPFL one of the leading universities in the world in this area.
