General Assembly has been acquired, and its nearly five-year-old D.C. campus doesn't expect to see any substantial staffing or programming changes as a result.
Early Monday morning, General Assembly co-founder and chief executive Jake Schwartz sent an email over the company's email list: The coding school had been acquired by The Adecco Group for $412.5 million.
Based in Zurich, Switzerland, Adecco is a staffing and workforce development company, and with the acquisition, the group can provide more job training and re-skilling services for its enterprise customers.
Schwartz tells Axios that the deal has been in talks, on and off, for about a year now. In all, General Assembly had raised nearly $120 million in venture capital funding since its founding in 2011, and its most recent funding round reportedly valued the company at $440 million.
General Assembly offers a variety of coding and programming skills courses, ranging from one-day workshops to part-time enrollment courses to full-time immersive cohorts. In the acquisition, General Assembly will remain an independent entity, functioning much in the same ways it always had, but under the Adecco umbrella. Schwartz will continue to serve as CEO. Only now, General Assembly will continue to focus more heavily on growing its business-to-business offerings using Adecco's resources.
In turn, General Assembly doesn't expect to see any staff changes in the D.C. location.
"The short answer is that we don't expect any changes to our D.C. campus or any of our programs and operations," a company spokesperson told DC Inno in an email today. "The only thing that might change is that this opens up the potential to put more supports in place for students through collaborations with other human-capital focused companies that make up the Adecco Group. But we are staying an independent company, and our teams, our campuses, our community, and our offerings won't be affected by this acquisition."
In 2013, General Assembly opened its D.C. campus through a partnership with 1776, which still stands today wherein General Assembly occupies a good portion of 1776's downtown D.C. location. And as coding school after coding school shuts its doors or fails to launch in the region, General Assembly and its offerings have remained pretty consistent.
Across all its 20 campuses, General Assembly has more than 500 employees and more than 50,000 alumni between its part-time and full-time programs.
"As our work with employers has grown, so has our need to connect in a deeper way with the world of human capital, and that is why we are so excited about the transformational opportunities that come with this acquisition," Schwartz said in a statement. "We chose the Adecco Group, global leader in HR solutions, because they bring a multitude of strategic opportunities to serve enterprise clients, solve pervasive digital skills gaps, and align our offerings with the world-class companies that comprise the Adecco Group network."
