Education Company MasterClass Raises $35 Million Series C

New Investor IVP Leads Round to Accelerate Class Development and Expand the MasterClass Instructor Roster

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Mar 28, 2017, 10:05 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, March 28, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Premier online education platform MasterClass, with classes taught by instructors such as Aaron Sorkin, Serena Williams, Gordon Ramsay, and Frank Gehry, today announces a $35 million Series C funding round led by IVP with participation from new investors including GSV Acceleration and Sam Lessin. Existing investors, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Javelin Venture Partners, Bloomberg Beta, Advancit Capital, Novel TMT, Yan-David Erlich, and Matthew Rutler (MX Investments) also participated in the round. This brings the total funding raised by the company to $56.4 million to date.

MasterClass plans to use the funding to accelerate class development, expand the roster of instructors, and build out the team to make it possible for anyone in the world to learn from the best. Eric Liaw (IVP) and Roseanne Wincek (IVP) will be joining the board alongside existing board members Rick Yang (NEA) and Alex Gurevich (Javelin Venture Partners).

"We are honored to lead the Series C round at MasterClass," said Eric Liaw, General Partner at IVP. "From Serena Williams teaching tennis to Gordon Ramsay teaching cooking to Kevin Spacey teaching acting and soon Shonda Rhimes teaching television writing, they are delivering on their mission to make the knowledge of the world's great masters available to everyone and it's exciting to partner with them."

Led by co-founder and CEO David Rogier, MasterClass provides online classes from world-renowned instructors that you can't get anywhere else. Each class offers a unique learning experience, which includes video lessons from the instructor, interactive exercises, course materials, peer interaction, and more. All classes are available online for individual purchase at www.masterclass.com for $90 each.

"We launched MasterClass with the belief that everyone should be able to learn from the best and a hope that if we could do that we had a chance to make the world just a little more equal. This round of funding will enable us to accelerate the sharing of knowledge," said Rogier. "We're thrilled to be working with the IVP team."

About MasterClass:
Established in 2015, the San Francisco-based company was founded on the idea that everyone should have "access to genius." The premiere online education platform provides affordable, engaging, and inspirational online classes taught by world-renowned instructors, making it possible for anyone to learn from the best. Each class offers a unique learning experience, which includes video lessons, interactive exercises, a series of course materials, peer interaction, and more. MasterClass' current roster of courses includes Christina Aguilera (singing), Kevin Spacey (acting), Usher (performance), Gordon Ramsay (cooking), Serena Williams (tennis), James Patterson (writing), Dustin Hoffman (acting), Werner Herzog (filmmaking), Aaron Sorkin (screenwriting), Reba McEntire (country music), Hans Zimmer (film scoring), and Deadmau5 (electronic music production). Most recently, the company announced pre-enrollment for Shonda Rhimes (writing for television), Frank Gehry (design and architecture), and Steve Martin (comedy). For more information, please visit www.masterclass.com.

About IVP:
With $5.4 billion of committed capital, IVP is one of the premier later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms in the United States. Founded in 1980, IVP has invested in over 300 companies, 105 which have gone public. IVP is one of the top-performing firms in the industry and has a 36-year IRR of 43.2%. IVP specializes in venture growth investments, industry rollups, founder liquidity transactions, and select public market investments. IVP investments include such notable companies as AppDynamics (CSCO), Business Insider (Axel Springer), Buddy Media (CRM), Casper, Compass, Datalogix (ORCL), Domo, Dropbox, Dropcam (GOOGLE), Fleetmatics (FLTX), GitHub, HomeAway (AWAY), The Honest Company, Kayak (PCLN), Klarna, LegalZoom, LifeLock (LOCK), Marketo (MKTO), Mindbody (MB), MySQL (ORCL), Netflix (NFLX), Omniture (ADOBE), Personal Capital, Pure Storage (PSTG), Slack, Snap (SNAP), SoFi, Supercell (SoftBank), Synchronoss (SNCR), Tanium, Twitter (TWTR), Yext, and Zynga (ZNGA). For more information, visit www.ivp.com or follow IVP on Twitter: @ivp.

SOURCE MasterClass