Academy raises $4m in Seed funding

• the $4m Seed funding round was led by LocalGlobe. Emerge Education and more than 25 other leading industry operators from the likes of Microsoft, Slack and GoCardless also participated

• Academy has developed a game-changing way to tackle the shortage of talent for tech, particularly outside London, Oxford and Cambridge

• the platform is solving this problem by making tech training accessible to a more diverse pool of candidates and allowing companies to plug in and access this talent

• on gender and racial mix Academy is already outperforming society – with talent that is 50%+ female, 60%+ from a minority ethnic background, and 30% identifying as black

• Academy only selects the top 0.5% of talent, making it more selective than Google, 10x more competitive than Harvard, and all with twice the NPS score of each

• portfolio companies from investors including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Y Combinator are already using Academy to solve their recruitment challenges

• the funding round will enable Academy to train thousands of graduates for high-growth careers within a group of exclusive partners in the tech industry

Academy – the UK startup behind the most diverse and most selective talent and development programme of its kind – has raised a $4m Seed funding round, led by LocalGlobe, to identify, train and develop the next generation of tech leaders. Emerge Education, as well as more than 25 leading industry operators from the likes of Microsoft, Slack and GoCardless, also participated in the round.

Founded by the former Chief People Officer of THG, Ashley Ramrachia, Academy’s focus is on accelerating exceptional individuals from diverse backgrounds into tech roles and leadership trajectories at fast-growing and category-leading companies.

Academy leverages the skills blueprint which drove THG to unicorn status, building a scalable talent pipeline for employers to drive immediate delivery and their next generation of leadership. Companies can plug into Academy’s full-service infrastructure - gaining access to a rarefied supply of skilled tech talent and a wide roster of coaching, development and support.

The most selective, most diverse programme of its kind

Academy’s philosophy is ‘merit over means’ - fast-tracking the top 0.5% of applicants in a way that breaks traditional barriers of gender, race and degree background. After a short intense and transformative training period, Academy accelerates these candidates into tech roles and leadership trajectories at ambitious companies.

Academy offers young people:

• a free and exceptional tech training and mentorship programme to a diverse group of high-aptitude graduates from across all sectors and disciplines

While at the same time offering companies:

• access to the most diverse pool of the very best fresh tech talent seen anywhere in the UK via a game-changing development platform

This approach not only makes Academy the most prestigious programme of its kind – more selective than Google, and 10x more competitive than Harvard – but it is also the most diverse ever seen.

Academy’s candidates comprehensively outperform the diversity mix in society: more than 50% are women, more than 60% come from a minority ethnic background and 30% identified as black.

Academy – a powerful engine of social mobility

As well as exceeding targets for gender and ethnicity, Academy has also reached candidates from a broad range of socio-economic groups. A quarter of Academy candidates were the first members of their family to go into higher education and the same number are classed as neurodiverse or have a disability. A further 10% are able to complete Academy training while having responsibilities as a carer.

By drawing people from non-traditional backgrounds into tech, Academy is building an infrastructure and community of future leaders who would more typically have been attracted to careers in the consulting, banking and accounting industries. Already, Academy is persuading the best and brightest graduates to join its programme: enlisting trainees who have turned down or left graduate roles at BCG, Citibank and Deloitte, alongside others with backgrounds in entrepreneurship, law and public sector work.

What’s more, even though 70% of Academy’s talent comes from non-STEM backgrounds, the average employment salary is higher than Computer Science graduates from some of the UK’s leading Russell Group universities, like Durham and Bristol.

Once placed with a company, scholars also benefit from Academy’s development service which offers partner companies on-going mentorship, development and training of recruits, effectively guaranteeing performance and retention to the company.

So highly-regarded is its course, Academy has already gained a training NPS of 75, almost twice the 41 reported for Harvard Business School, and Google’s employee NPS of 39.

A tried-and-tested approach

While at THG, Ramrachia pioneered a radical new model to meet the scaling needs of the company: building an internal technology and leadership academy, and opening up recruitment to non-Computer Science graduates in order to widen the funnel of available talent.

Although the tech sector is globally one of the world’s fastest growing, successful ecosystems, it is dogged by skills shortages and difficulty retaining staff with sought-after skills. While the sector is growing at three times the rate of the rest of the economy, tech vacancies regularly exceed 100,000 a week. Yet the industry continues to struggle to recruit from outside its core base of white, male, middle-class STEM graduates.

Ramrachia’s approach became THG’s talent investment blueprint and helped power the firm to its $7bn IPO – at the time London’s largest ever tech IPO. Now, Ramrachia is making this model available to other ambitious tech companies; companies who have a huge appetite for staff but which are struggling to embed and fully develop their recruits while guaranteeing diversity and inclusion due to this worldwide skills squeeze.

Ashley Ramrachia, founder and CEO of Academy said: “Academy is building a new way of developing talent that has the potential to safeguard the future of the tech sector as a whole. Right now there is abundant capital for the tech sector but one area that is holding back the growth and potential of many companies is the difficulty in finding, hiring and retaining talented individuals. Companies are looking in the same old places for recruits and that is deterring some of the best possible minds from applying to work in this sector. By widening the pool of talent; by making sure that candidates’ financial situation is never a barrier; and by paying scholars which assures them that they can take the leap without risk, it is possible to solve this problem. We know what we are doing works, because we did at THG and we are now providing just that sort of bespoke service for lots of other fast-growing companies.”

Development-as-a-service

Through a scalable platform, Academy effectively becomes an extension of its partner companies’ HR function to support, develop and ultimately get the best performance out of new joiners. It guarantees access to talent and increases diversity of the talent pipeline, allowing leading firms to plug in and access best-in-class onboarding, development, mentoring and support. This in turn significantly increases staff retention and loyalty.

Case study partnership with a future unicorn

Beamery, recently valued at $800M in its Series C, has been working with Academy to identify, train and accelerate its future leaders in software engineering with twin ambitions of high performance and high focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.

The partnership has developed technical and leadership skills amongst incoming hires and existing employees, including workshops on mentoring, ongoing leadership coaching and core technical training.

Following Academy training, seven people are joining Beamery in software engineering roles – achieving a cohort diversity of 57% female and 43% minority ethnic background – as a key part of Beamery’s commitment to increasing access to opportunities.

Ashley Ramrachia, founder and CEO of Academy continued: “As the growing worldwide skills gap clearly demonstrates, tech recruitment today simply isn’t fit for purpose for fast-growing companies. If we are to build a globally successful tech industry then we need to reinvent recruitment and development by putting diversity and inclusion at its heart. With our very first cohort we have managed to address a problem that entire industries have struggled with for decades – identifying, training and developing people from all walks of life to become the next tech leaders. The investment we’ve received with this Seed funding round will help us take this mission even further and we’re thrilled so many of the industry’s brightest minds buy into what we’re achieving.”

Saul Klein, co-founder LocalGlobe, said: “Academy has put together an inspirational team of executives who have first hand experience of recruiting for some of the world’s best tech companies at scale, and for developing talent that takes those companies to the next level. Academy graduates are the future leaders of the tech sector’s best companies. Ash’s proven track record, dedication to the industry and his sheer determination to see people reach their full potential is awesome to behold and will bring huge dividends to those companies that partner with his team.”

Sharon Akaka, Founding Scholar at Academy, and junior full stack developer at Beryl, said: “The Academy programme is everything that I was looking for and more. Embarking on a career in software engineering without a background in a related university degree can be challenging. There isn’t an exact formula for making the transition. Bootcamps were too costly, and I had accepted my fate as a self-taught engineer but this programme has enabled me to acquire the technical skills that I needed and also gives me the tools that enable personal development and increased leadership ability. To top it off, I've also been able to access the guidance and support I lacked when I was self-teaching.”

Michael Paterson, Co-founder and CTO at Beamery, said: “Identifying and nurturing high-calibre talent at a grass roots level will help to address issues in the market that the skills gap poses. We partnered with Academy not only to help find brilliant future leaders, but to put repeatable systems and processes in place to ensure that a career, and not just a job, is available to all - whatever the academic or social background. Academy’s approach to combining diverse talent with a first-rate technical education aligns with Beamery’s aim of creating a more diverse, inclusive and equitable tech future.”