NEW YORK, Teachable, a NY-based startup founded in 2014, is a course creation platform transforming online education by connecting instructors directly with their students. Today, Teachable announced it has closed a $4 million round of funding and projects to grow beyond $120 million in course sales in 2017, outpacing tech education giants.

Funding was led by Accomplice Ventures (Snapchat, AngelList), Naval Ravikant (Twitter, Uber, Postmates) and Matt Brezina (Dropbox). Teachable plans to use the new capital to hire extensively, primarily to invest in product development, user experience, and growth.

Ankur Nagpal, Teachable CEO
In a scant 3 years and with a team of less than 30, Teachable has reached over 3 million students with over 20,000 live online courses, hosted by more than 7,500 instructors. Teachable has been able to grow so quickly largely because of its unique strategy of prioritizing course creators.

'Unlike other course hosting platforms that try and simultaneously acquire students and teachers, we began our business by focusing entirely on giving teachers the best experience-instant payments, complete customizability on branding and full ownership of student data,' said Teachable founder and CEO Ankur Nagpal. 'When we did this, we were able to acquire the best teachers in the world who in turn had passionate student followings that joined Teachable without us spending time or money recruiting them. Today, close to 15,000 new students join a Teachable course for the first time every day.'

The global market for e-Learning is projected to exceed $241 billion by 2022 according to market research firm Global Industry Analysts. As major institutions like higher education and the full-time job economy grow less reliable, Teachable is leading the new market by empowering teachers, entrepreneurs, and everyday people to share their expertise and make a living online.

'The future of our economy will be powered by digital entrepreneurs,' said Matt Brezina. 'By investing in Teachable I'm thrilled to be supporting the leading company that enables anyone with a valuable skill or experience to sell courses online.'

Teachable previously raised $1 million in July 2014, $1 million in December 2014, and $2,5 million in March 2016. The company has attracted celebrity instructors such as Carrie-Anne Moss, and enterprise customers including the New York Times, Mozilla, The University of Pennsylvania and ICANN.

About Teachable

Teachable is an online course creation platform that empowers everyone to create and sell online courses to teach what they know and earn a living online. By January 2017, over 7,500 Teachable instructors had sold more than $36 million in online courses.