Education startup Udacity wants to help you "be in demand."
Sebastian Thrun, also known for launching Google's secretive hardware lab Google X, founded the company in 2011 with the lofty goal of democratizing education.
After realizing that Udacity's free online courses had dismal completion rates, the company pivoted a little over a year ago to a new model that it believes is better aimed at actually helping students not only learn, but land new jobs.
Enter: Nanodegrees.
Instead of only providing a bunch of singular, lecture-style classes, Udacity partnered with major tech companies like Google, Cloudera, Facebook, and Salesforce to build classes that fit neatly into a handful of credentialed, project-focused programs.
The idea is that anyone who completes one of the nine nanodegrees — which include front-end web developer, Android developer, and data analyst — will be perfectly primed to get a job, since big companies actually helped design the curriculum.
Over 10,000 students from 168 countries have enrolled in the nanodegree program, and the company just raised a $105 million Series D round to continue scaling that growth. Udacity says that the latest round values it at $1 billion, making it the latest in the growing herd of Silicon Valley tech unicorns.
Unlike many of its peers though, Udacity has reached profitability, hitting that milestone for the first time earlier this year.
All of the company's classes are still available individually for free, but nanodegree students pay about $200 a month for between six to nine months to work through a program in which they'll get one-on-one project feedback (if they complete the program fully, they can get half of that tuition back).
For example, someone who takes the Android developer nanodegree will actually build products that integrate with Google code and fulfill criteria that Google has told Udacity it's looking for. Each completed project gets reviewed by one of Udacity's 400+ global code reviewers.
As it moves forward, Udacity's sights are sky-high.
"It’s not a technology moonshot in the same way that putting balloons into the stratosphere is — it’s a really important societal moonshot," Thrun told Business Insider in a past interview. "We want to double the world’s GDP — that’s our ambitious goal."
International education company Bertelsmann led Udacity's round, with Baillie Gifford, Emerson Collective, and Google Ventures joining as new investors. Bertelsmann CEO Kay Krafft is also joining Udacity's board.
