Career Karma: Training for Growing Professionals
The leading career navigation platform for consumers
Technological advancements are creating jobs that previously did not exist, including app developers, cloud computing specialists, and social media managers. Unfortunately, while these new positions are aiding the economy by creating more jobs, there’s a significant gap between the labor market supply and the business demand for these skills. By 2030, there will be a global shortage of more than 85 million tech workers, representing $8.5 trillion in lost annual revenue.
Alumni Ventures portfolio company Career Karma offers free coaching and peer mentorship for various positions, serving as a bridge between professionals and reskilling programs (the process of learning new skills to find a different job or career path). The company’s marketplace helps workers select the best job training program for their needs and includes an extensive online library of reskilling advice and Clubhouse-style live audio rooms to support them before, during, and after their training programs.
Supporting a Growing Need
Companies like Guild Education ($3.7 billion valuation) and Degreed ($1.4 billion valuation) have found success with helping enterprise customers reskill employees. However, Career Karma captures a more significant portion of the market by targeting end-users directly. Job training programs pay Career Karma through either a pay-per introduction fee or a premium content subscription fee to acquire qualified applicants and gain visibility within its online community.
What We Liked About Career Karma
Significant Market Opportunity: The reskilling/upskilling market is a fast-growing segment of the post-secondary education market, valued at $2.2 trillion.
Knowledgeable Team: CEO and Co-Founder Ruben Harris has been able to recognize and take advantage of the macro trends in the market to scale and de-risk Career Karma from an early stage.
Additionally, like Ruben, the management team at Career Karma is highly mission-driven, with personal backgrounds that required reskilling to make career transitions. The CTO and CPO co-founded a prior venture (Breaking Into Startups) with Ruben, and the broader team has significant experience in the ed-tech and employee engagement space.
Impressive Investor Syndicate: Top Tier Capital Partners (exits VMWare, Chegg, and Anaplan) led Career Karma’s recent Series B with participation from Google Ventures (exits Robinhood, Upstart, 23&Me, Slack, and Giphy), Softbank, YC, and Emerson Collective.
Additionally, the company’s Series A was led by 3x Midas List investor Garry Tan of Initialized Capital (Coinbase, Instacart), who also participated in this most recent round.
How We Are Involved
Strawberry Creek Ventures (for the UC Berkeley community) participated in Career Karma’s $40 million Series B along with sibling funds Blue Ivy Ventures (for the Yale community), Bascom Ventures (for the Wisconsin community), and Towerview Ventures (for the Duke community).
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Contact [email protected] for additional information. To see additional risk factors and investment considerations, visit av-funds.com/disclosures.