Go1 was started in a garage in Logan, south of Brisbane, by four mates: Andrew Barnes, Vu Tran, Chris Eigeland and Chris Hood. It began building its learning platform in 2015, and Y Combinator was an early backer.
Here’s the interesting part. Go1 doesn’t make a single course itself. It sells access to everyone else’s.
The model
One subscription gets a company access to a huge library of training content from hundreds of providers, from compliance modules to Harvard Business Publishing and Pluralsight. Think Netflix for corporate training. Go1 sits in the middle and owns the shelf.
The customers
Reported customers include TikTok, Microsoft and the University of Oxford, plus government contracts in Singapore and Malaysia. By 2022 it said it was serving more than 5 million learners, with North America its biggest market.
The money
- US$200M Series D in 2021, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which made it a unicorn
- More than US$100M in 2022 at a US$2B valuation
- Around US$400M raised in total, as reported
Backers along the way include Y Combinator, Microsoft’s M12, Salesforce Ventures, Madrona, AirTree, SEEK and SoftBank.
My read
The lesson is that you don’t have to make the content to own the shelf. Go1 picked the aggregation layer and let everyone else fight over production. It’s also a reminder that one of the country’s biggest edtech companies came out of Logan, not the Sydney and Melbourne bubble.