Two ex-Udemy leaders launched Modal to teach employees in cohorts, raising $6.8M

Cohort-based learning platform for companies' existing employees, starting with data literacy in eight-week programs of 30-40 people.

That curated, cohort-based learning with owned content beats asynchronous self-serve courses as the way companies upskill employees.

$6.8M from Signalfire, Norwest Venture Partners, Learn Capital, Bling Capital and others

Darren Shimkus spent five years scaling Udemy Business from $1M to $100M in annual recurring revenue, then left as president eight months before the IPO. Over six months he interviewed heads of data, talent development and engineering and concluded human connection had to return to learning.

He teamed up with former Udemy CEO Dennis Yang and incorporated Modal. Months later, Udemy itself acquired CorpU, a cohort-based leadership development platform. Modal raised $6.8M.

Modal launched publicly on 9 February 2022, with data literacy as its first product; it declined to share revenue targets, customer counts or customer names.

Shimkus believed human connection was missing from learning, a view he reached after interviewing data, talent and engineering leaders.

He believed the pandemic, distributed work and the Great Resignation made the company possible now: 'I couldn't have built this company two years ago'.

Owning content, rather than letting instructors publish, was meant to differentiate Modal from the marketplace model.

Insiders who leave an incumbent often build the opposite model; the real test is whether the buyer pays more for human-led cohorts than for self-serve libraries.

As of 9 February 2022, Modal had just launched with one data-literacy product and no disclosed customers or revenue. TechCrunch described the moonshot as betting that curated cohort learning, not asynchronous learning, is the future, and noted competitors like Maven and Udemy's CorpU.