SAN FRANCISCO?A startup intent on making it simple for anyone to teach online announced Tuesday that it has received a million dollars in funding from "angel investors."
Udemy.com will use the cash to hire workers and ramp-up operations, co-founder Gagan Biyani told AFP.
"We want to essentially democratize education so that anyone can teach over the Internet," Biyani said. "We make it really easy for anyone to develop an online course.
"We don't give advice how to teach, but we provide the tools to do it."
Biyani and the two other co-founders have been the entire workforce since Udemy launched in May in the northern California city of Palo Alto.
Most courses listed at Udemy on Tuesday were free to aspiring students. Topics ranged from how to start a business or use computer software tools to winning at poker or picking up women.
The course list included an online class by high-level Google executive Marissa Mayer titled "Ideas come from everywhere."
More than a thousand instructors have created courses at Udemy, with a host of offerings coming from prestigious US universities including Stanford, Yale, and MIT.
Biyani said that he and fellow founders Eren Bali and Oktay Caglar began working on Udemy about two years ago after meeting at the Founder Institute, a training camp for entrepreneurs run by thefunded.com.
The significant financing won by Udemy is a prime example of how angel investors in the form of technology firm success stories are stepping in to back people with cool new ideas, according to Adeo Ressi of thefunded.com.
He said that the amount of money being invested by venture capital firms has sunk while folks reaping rewards at hot companies such as Google, Facebook, or Zynga are sinking newfound wealth into startups that they think hold promise.
"You have a decline in venture capital with a really aggressive surge in angel investing," Ressi said. "These angels are essentially coming to the rescue of new startups."
Ressi declared 2010 the year of the angel investor, saying he hasn't seen this type of situation before in his more than 15 years as an entrepreneur.
