According to Business Insider, San Francisco-based edtech startup Sphere secured $4.3 million in seed funding led by Felicis Ventures.

Y Combinator, Uncommon Capital, and several prominent angel investors including some of the founders of Go1, Lyft, BetterUp and Flexport also participated.

Founded in 2020 by Nicholas Rudder and Adrian Sarstedt, Sphere was originally called ScholarSite. 

The company provides education service focusing on software engineering skills like machine learning and data science.

According to Rudder, Sphere’s teachers can independently build out their own curriculum. By offering live course rather than video or other forms, Sphere has seen completion rates of over 80%, compared to 4% on average for asynchronous classes. 

At the current stage, the course costs around $1,000 per student, and the company has been approved as a provider for 700 different tech companies to have their course fees covered for employees as a learning and development expense.

After getting accepted into Y Combinator's winter 2022 cohort this year, Sphere used the connections it made during the program to meet with several VCs including the team at Felicis Ventures, who signed on to Sphere's seed round as the cohort wrapped up in the spring. Some of these enterprise clients include Flipkart, Tinder, Flexport, and Stripe.