Today marks one year and one month since our first students started in the Udacity Nanodegree program—credentials designed to give individuals the skills they need to be in demand for jobs that changes their ability to contribute to society and improves their economic future.
In the last year, we have had over 11,000 students enrolled in the Nanodegree program across 168 countries and have recently hit our 1,000th graduate with Momen Zakaria, an Egyptian living in Saudi Arabia. Students are getting new jobs like Kelly Marchisio who landed an engineering position at Google while working on her Nanodegree. Over the past 12 months, we have seen strong and sustainable revenue growth, which enabled us to hit profitability earlier this year.
To scale the business, we have secured financing of $105 million in our Series D round from marquee global investors. The round was led by international media, services and education company Bertelsmann with Scotland’s Baillie Gifford, Emerson Collective and Google Ventures joining as new investors. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Drive Capital also participated in the round. As a part of the round, Kay Krafft, CEO Bertelsmann Education Group will join our board. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.This latest round values our company at $1 billion, making it an exciting yet humbling moment in our history.
Our mission at Udacity is to democratize education making it affordable and accessible to billions of people around the globe to get the jobs they want to improve their lives. While we have made great strides, we have a long way to go in reaching our goal. As our CEO Sebastian Thrun likes to say, world-class education should not be limited to the one percent but be available to everyone. With the new funding, our passionate team, strong partners, and most of all, our amazing students, we are on our way to reaching the 99 percent.
