online platform

Pluralsight is an online platform that offers video courses and certification to gain knowledge that will help one stay updated in the 21st century. From various courses on software development to gaining creative knowledge, Pluralsight has made everything available. Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams founded Pluralsight in 2004 as a classroom training company. But, to keep up with the time it evolved eventually to an online platform similar to Coursera and Udemy. The company’s headquarters is based in Utah, US and it is owned by Vista Equity Partners.

About Pluralsight

Back when the company was founded, Pluralsight used to send instructors to a business or training event. But today, with the help of an online learning platform, it is making the training courses available for everyone. Pluralsight uses a subscription-based model and focuses mainly on training tech-based professionals like software and security developers, IT professionals, product managers, etc.

Pluralsight has split its training approach into two paths, skills and flow. In the skill path, the platform lets the users learn and adapt new skills, upgrade skills according to needs, etc. In the flow path, a person can compare between old and new codes, fix bugs, use data to measure each team member’s contribution, etc. The minimum cost of the Pluralsight platform starts from $29 per month.

Brief history

The company started as a classroom training service in 2004 but after three years shifted its focus to online video training. Pluralsight started making huge profits in 2011 and it is also in the top 20 list of Utah companies. Inc 5000 also named it as one of the fastest-growing private companies and one of the top education companies. In 2012, the company went into a partnership with Microsoft such that the courses of the company were available for the MSDN subscribers. Pluralsight also launched a free programming coding boot camp that focused on offering coding classes to kids who are 10 and above. The company also provided a free one-year subscription to its training library for the Utah K-12 teachers.

In 2017, Pluralsight ranked #20 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and also made it into the list of Great Place To Work’s 2017 Best Workplaces (for small and medium-sized companies). Next year, Pluralsight filed for its IPO and began trading publicly but in December 2020 it was acquired by a private equity firm called Vista Equity Partners. The deal was closed by $3.5 billion. In the past decade, Pluralsight has successfully landed many corporate clients, and the majority of them are Fortune 500 companies.

Funding

When Pluralsight was started, it was a self-funded venture as each of the four founders contributed $5000. For a very long time, the company didn’t receive any external funding until December 2012 when the Series A funding round was conducted. In the first funding round, Pluralsight raised $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners and received an additional $2.5 million later. In 2014, Pluralsight raised another $135 million in Series B funding when some new investors like ICONIQ Capital and Sorenson Capital joined in. During that time, Pluralsight became the first Utah-based company ever to receive that much amount of funding. After the Series C funding round in 2016, Pluralsight became a billion-dollar company.

Acquisitions

Pluralsight started acquiring a series of companies from 2013 starting with e-learning and education businesses. It acquired PeepCode in July 2013 followed by TrainSignal and Tekpub in the same year. In 2014, it acquired Digital-Tutors expanding Pluralsight’s training courses to media and design. Later in the same year, it acquired an online skill assessment platform called Smarterer. Some of the other companies it acquired in the last few years are Train Simple, GitPrime, Next Tech, etc.

About Aaron Skonnard – CEO and co-founder

Aaron started to code from a very young age when his father bought him an Apple II computer. He completed his studies in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and worked at various companies like 3M, Intel, and Axiom Technologies. He also published a few books and invested in start-ups that emerged in Utah.