Coursera Raises $16M From Kleiner Perkins, NEA

April 18, 2012

[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Coursera has raised $16 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). As part of the investment round, John Doerr, partner at KPCB, and Scott Sandell, General Partner at NEA, have joined Coursera’s board of directors.

Coursera was founded by Stanford Computer Science Professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. It is an online education platform that offers classes from top universities and professors for free. Courses are offered in multiple disciplines, including business, medicine, social studies, history, literature, mathematics and computer science, among others.

John Doerr: Higher education is ripe for innovation: it is too expensive and limited to a few.

Seven courses from Stanford, University of California, Berkeley and University of Michigan have been running for several weeks, and around 30 more courses will launch later this week and through late summer, says the organization. The Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania are Coursera’s latest partners.