CourseHorse operates a marketplace that enables users to discover and enroll in local classes spanning casual programs (cooking, art) to professional courses (finance, programming). Led by CEO & co-founder Nihal Parthasarathi, the company aggregates offerings from universities, cultural institutions and education providers. It works with over 1,500 class providers, listing 70,000 classes for 200,000 members nationwide. Current educators on the platform include Columbia University, Stanford Graduate School of Business, General Assembly, New York Public Library, California State University and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. The company recently raised $4M in funding and will use the proceeds to accelerate expansion beyond New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago and to expand its engineering team to build out product offerings. CourseHorse is positioned to grow its marketplace footprint and product capabilities using the new capital. CourseHorse operates a curated class discovery platform and centralized booking engine that aggregates more than 20,000 classes from over 500 local education providers. The company takes a commission on each class booked through its engine and reports strong growth metrics: traffic growing ~40% month-over-month and enrollment and revenue growing around 50% monthly. CourseHorse was co-founded by NYU graduates Katie Kapler and Nihal Parthasarathi and counts Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley as an adviser. Until this round the company had been purposely bootstrapped and lean; it now plans product expansion including a stronger recommendation engine in the next version of CourseHorse. The funds will support geographic expansion beyond New York, including a Time Out partnership to launch CourseHorse-powered discovery on Time Out’s NYC and Los Angeles sites and a planned Los Angeles launch, with two to three additional cities targeted over the next year. The team comprises six full-time employees plus contractors as it scales the product and market footprint.

Total raised

$5M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jan 2016