YC-backed Turing College secures $1.05m to scale to Estonia

• Edtech Turing College secures a $1.05 million seed round to continue the expansion of its online self-paced data science career school into Estonia and the Netherlands.
• The Vilnius-based startup, which was part of the Y Combinator W21 batch, has now received $2.5 million in funding in total.
• With its concept proven to work and new funding in place, the startup now plans to establish new learning communities in Estonia.

Vilnius, September 6: The online data science career school Turing College has raised a seed round of $1.05 million. The funding round, which was led by Iron Wolf Capital and also featured Silicon Valley angel investors, will enable Turing College to expand its student base to Estonia. In this way, it will continue to address a critical skills gap in data science learning and recruitment to help companies meet the ever-growing data science demand.

The European Commission states that the number of data professionals will increase to 8.4 million in the EU27 by 2025, adding 1.8 million positions in 2020-2025. It will lead to a potential data skills gap of approximately 484,000 unfilled jobs, corresponding to 5.7% of total demand.

The latest $1.05 million seed round was led by Iron Wolf Capital. Kasparas Jurgelionis, Managing Partner at Iron Wolf said: "We are excited to be supporting Turing College in their continued growth and development. They already have 3 cohorts and their learners are getting hired, so it is clear that the concept works. And the team has proven itself to be diligent, adaptable, and forward-thinking, so we have no doubt they will be successful in their roll out to new markets." Spring Capital also participated in the round, as did a number of Silicon Valley angels, including Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs, Outschool co-founder Mikhail Seregine, and one of the first employees at Dropbox. Since Turing College's foundation in 2020, it has now secured $2.5 million in funding. This includes $125,000 which came as part of its participation in the Y Combinator W21 batch when it became the first Lithuanian startup to join Y Combinator's accelerator.

Regarding the use of its new funding, Turing College's CEO Lukas Kaminskis said: "Our online learning platform is now developed and successfully road-tested. This means it is now time to bring our offering to other countries across Europe." 

Initially, Turing College will be focusing on entering Estonia. Ben Sidlauskas, Co-Founders and CBDO at Turing College, will be personally focused on the tech-savvy Estonian market. Ben Sidlauskas said: "Estonia has one of the world's most advanced digital societies, and in general it is one of the world's most technologically advanced countries. So, focusing on such a market with a digital, data-driven education product makes so much sense." 

Uptake for Turing College has been strong. Its first batch of learners commenced their studies in November 2020, and there are currently three different batches progressing through the course. Several learners have already been hired as data scientists. 

About Turing College:

Turing College is a data science career school operating in Europe in Europe co-founded by Lukas Kaminskis, Tomas Moška, and Benas Sidlauskas. It is a member of the Y Combinator program and has received $2.575 million in funding to date. It has launched 3 cohorts of data science learners so far, and currently has 70 learners from Lithuania, the Netherlands, Serbia, Ireland, Nigeria, and Latvia progressing through its course. 

Turing College has hiring partnerships with global companies in a range of sectors, including tech, biotech, cybersecurity, and aviation. These include partners headquartered in the US (Moody's, Argyle), the UK (Satalia), Estonia (Luminor), Lithuania (Nord Security, Biomapas, Hostinger, Kilo. Health, and more), and Switzerland (iSun). Through this network of hiring partners, Turing College has already successfully secured new data science roles for a number of its learners.