Ironhack Raises $4M For Present And Future Software Engineers

About six years after setting up its first coding bootcamp, Miami-based Ironhack has raised $4 million in a funding round led by JME Capital, bringing its total funding to $7 million. Other investors participated in the round, including All Iron Ventures and Brighteye Ventures.

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The coding bootcamp has trained over 3,000 graduates, specialized in topics like UX design and data analysts. Beyond Miami, Ironhacks has an international presence in Europe and Latin America through nine campuses. It currently connects its graduates to over 700 employers, including companies like Facebook and Uber.

The CEO Ariel Quinones says the round will help Ironhack build its international presence more, growing beyond the nine campuses within its existing regions. One of its competitive advantages, Quinones says, is that Ironhack doesn’t target the traditional tech hubs like New York and San Francisco.

“We started the company at a time where coding boot camps were just starting to generate attention, and we had a lot of questions on if [the business model] was viable to generate [impact] outside of the tier 1 tech markets,” he said.

He says that they are willing to set up shop and train coders in more underdeveloped tech hubs like Mexico City and São Paulo.

While he says they compete against local and regional players, he thinks it would be hard for “others outside of our market to come in and create what we’ve done over the past six years.”

Additionally, Quinones says the funding will help Ironhack target a new stream of revenue: corporate development.

“For employers, it’s not only an issue of bringing new talent,” Quinones told Crunchbase News.  The changing skills and demands of an existing workforce, he says, is something that Ironhack wants to anticipate and train for.

Few things are for sure: jobs are being transformed dramatically, and the dramatically saturated coding workshop and bootcamp industry has faced its fair share of closures. We’ll see if, new funding in hand, Ironhack’s double-pronged approach will crack the code.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias