Holberton School runs a two-year full-stack engineering program focused on core engineering fundamentals as an alternative to a traditional college experience. The school currently teaches about 200 students who pass a rigorous entry exam and it plans to scale to 1,000 students per year. Instead of charging tuition upfront, Holberton takes a 17 percent cut of graduates’ salary for the first three years after they obtain jobs. The team recently moved into a larger San Francisco space that can handle roughly 500 students to enable expansion. Holberton emphasizes diversity—recent classes were about 40 percent women and a slight majority were minorities. Past graduates have gone on to work at companies including Apple, IBM, Tesla, Docker and Dropbox. Holberton School offers a project-based, hands-on education to train software engineers and programmers using non-traditional learning techniques. Students are selected by an algorithm that gauges motivation, talent, and willingness to cooperate, according to co-founder Sylvain Kalache. The program mixes on-site project work with full-time internships and includes a two-year curriculum plus nine months of more specialized work. Tuition is free upfront; once graduates are employed they pay 17% of their gross salaries back to Holberton over three years. The school has mentors from companies like Docker and IBM and emphasizes teamwork and self-directed problem solving. It is located in San Francisco’s SoMA neighborhood. More than half of enrolled students are women and student ages range from 16 to 68.

Total raised

$11M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Apr 2018