As demand for its education upskilling offering ramped up during the pandemic, CEO Rachel Carlson said Guild Education was busy in recent months.
The company has long been focused on the intersection of two crucial factors weighing on the American labor market. The first is employers’ needs to rapidly fill jobs and the second is the need for employees to upskill or reskill to remain relevant in the jobs of the future.
Guild works with Fortune 500 companies to help their employees in entry-level roles earn high school and college diplomas, as well as skilled-trade certificates. To do so, Guild partners with universities and learning providers — including schools like Purdue University Global, Oregon State University and Southern New Hampshire University.
While the country had been narrowing its focus on these two pillars in recent years, Carlson, the company's co-founder, said Covid-19 was an accelerant.
“It felt like employers woke up to that reality, especially during Covid-19,” she said.
With business booming, Guild Education is bringing on a large round of funding meant to grow its team, its offerings and its impact.
Today, Guild announced a $150 million Series E financing round, bringing the company’s valuation to roughly $3.75 billion. The company first hit unicorn status following its Series D financing round in November 2019.
Investors in the most recent round included Bessemer Venture Partners, Cowboy Ventures, D1 Capital Partners, Emerson Collective, General Catalyst, GSV, Harrison Metal, ICONIQ, Next Play Capital, Redpoint and Salesforce Ventures.
Carlson told Denver Business Journal that demand largely spurred the need to bring on this capital, and that investors were ready to back the company.
“People know the business is growing so fast, so we got a fair amount of preemptive interest in taking on more capital,” she said.
One of the primary uses of the funding will be to grow Guild’s already rapidly expanding team. The company came into 2020 with nearly 450 employees and is set to cross the 1,000-person mark in the near future.
With this capital at its back, Carlson said she expects Guild to be at 1,300 employees by the end of the year. Those hires will be made both nationally and at the company’s Denver headquarters.
The company’s product and engineering team is set to double with these hires, as Guild plans to further invest in its payments and technology platform.
With a growing workforce, Carlson expects Guild’s return to work to look different than it did pre-pandemic.
“We’re thinking about, how might our offices be more of a gathering place?” she said.
In imagining Guild’s hybrid model, Carlson said the company would allow flexible work policies that give people the opportunity to do individual, heads-down work from home. And, in an effort to bring back culture, she floated the idea of Guild bringing full teams into the office on a quarterly basis to connect.
“What if for three days a quarter your team was on-site to do that team building, trust-building and strategy work,” she said.
In building out its technology platform, Guild will grow its coaching team and expand its learning marketplace to add more programs and focus areas, namely in cybersecurity, data analytics, digital marketing, ESL and health care.
As they announce this round, Carlson said Guild will once again offer its employees the opportunity to cash in on their vested equity. Employees that have worked at Guild for three or more years have the ability to sell up to 25% of their vested equity.
“It’s very in line with our mission on creating economic opportunity for not only our students, but all of our employees,” she said. Carlson added that Guild has offered this twice in the past and that employees have used it to put a down payment on a home, pay off student loans or help their parents retire.
While Covid-19 served as an inflection point for Guild, it isn’t the full story for Carlson.
“We have our work cut out for us for sure. While we’re thrilled Covid-19 is ending, on a million dimensions, none of what we’re seeing was tied to Covid, it was accelerated by Covid,” she said. “Especially all that automation and workforce dynamics that we’re going to live in this decade.”
