China’s leading children’s coding education startup, Codemao had announced the establishment of a school to train professionals.
Li Tianchi, founder and CEO of Codemao (编程猫), announced in a conference held recently that they plan to set up a school and promote it as soon as possible. The school will provide professional training on content, management, operation, etc. for offline partners. It will also assist in the development of offline cooperative programming teaching and explore the experience and empower the industry.
In May last year, Codemao announced the “One Hundred Cities, One Thousand Stores” plan. It is expected 1000 programming centers will be established in 100 cities across the country within three years. According to Jingmeiti, the number of offline stores has crossed 600.
In November this year, Codemao worked with Tsinghua University and the Educational Information Technology Standards Committee of the Ministry of Education to develop the first youth programming ability level standard. This month, the 2019 NCT National Youth Programming Ability Level Test was conducted in Beijing and Shanghai examinations were held in 19 areas across China.
Codemao’s main business comprises of online courses to teach coding, a 'creative community' to encourage communication between users, a 'campus education' to provide a systematic solution to teaching coding, and coding games so that children can play and learn at the same time.
Looking into the entire market for children's programming education, it is a track that is still growing rapidly, with more players entering the market. According to FirstInsight, prior to this, a total of 15 financing events took place in the coding education sector during the first three quarters of 2019. If compared to the same period last year, the amount of financing events has dropped by 19.
Prior to this Li Tianqi revealed that the number of Codemao students had reached 31.47 million. In June this year, the monthly income totaled CNY 61.22 million; and the income in the third quarter of 2019 went beyond CNY 200 million.
Li told EqualOcean in an interview earlier this year that he is eyeing on an IPO at the Science and Technology Innovation board. He reconfirmed it today when he stated that the firm has hired a top investment bank in China and will officially start planning its listing.
In addition, Codemao raised its Series C round of financing worth CNY 400 million earlier in November. The startup has raised a staggering CNY 1 billion over a total of 10 rounds.
The company said that the net proceeds will be used for research and development of its curriculum and technology-driven services.