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What Substack is to newsletters, Disco can become to live training. The startup closed a C$19 million (US$15 million) Series A funding round from the investors behind MasterClass and Coursera to enable its creators to potentially make a living from their live learning communities.
Prominent EdTech investor GSV Ventures led the round with participation from Inovia Capital, Golden Ventures and angels from Degreed, Shopify, Solana, Wattpad, Wealthsimple, Clearco and Indiegogo. Funds from the round will be used for product development, go-to-market scaling and hiring. The round of new funding closed at the end of February.
“Creators and organizations of all sizes need a platform like Shopify to run their live learning business.”
“Disco realizes that live learning is the future and creators and organizations of all sizes need a platform like Shopify to run their live learning business,” said Deborah Quazzo, managing partner at GSV Ventures, who will joined the company’s board of directors. “We are thrilled to support this stellar team pioneering the future of live learning.”
For her part, Disco co-founder Candice Faktor was equally effusive about GSV Ventures and Quazzo. Faktor named GSV one of the most prominent and important EdTech investors in the world, funding Coursera, MasterClass, Guild and other startups. Faktor told BetaKit that Quazzo brings a wealth of experience and understanding of education technology, as well as a large network.
“She was incredibly supportive of our mission,” noted Factor.
In the same way that Substack allows writers to create and monetize newsletters, Disco allows creators to do the same with online learning communities.
“We believe that knowledge creators are the entrepreneurs of the future, and they deserve a platform that gives them ownership and control of their empire,” said Faktor.
RELATED: Virtual Live Learning Platform Disco Raises $6M CAD Seed Round
Disco — the Latin word for learning — offers a platform for creating and teaching, learning and engaging, marketing and selling, and managing and scaling a live learning empire, according to the startup.
Although Disco has what Faktor characterizes as “hundreds” of creators using its free entry level, its premium platform is where all the buzz is generated. Like Substack, which actively attracts big-name authors to write on its newsletter platform, Disco has done the same with its Disco Studios.
Disco Studios provides the Disco platform to premium creators, but also helps them with strategy, design, marketing and sales, as well as curriculum and community design.
Among the first-rate creatives are the dean of the Rotman School of Management, Roger Martin; New Yorker writer Adam Davidson and Olympic gold medal sprinter Andre DeGrasse.
RELATED: MasterClass unveils first Canadian hub employees, aims to add dozens
Perhaps Disco’s biggest addition to its portfolio of premium artists is world-renowned Canadian author Margaret Atwood.
Demonstrating the power of influencer networks to scale a startup, Atwood’s learning experience featured a wide range of guests, including author Dave Eggers, environmentalist David Suzuki, and environmental writer Bill McKibben, among others. Disco says more than 700 people have signed up for Atwood’s training.
Factor describes Atwood as a “cultural icon” who loves to use and create new experiences with technology. “What she was really interested in was not teaching a creative writing course, but rather building a live learning community around practical solutions to help some of our biggest problems,” Factor said.
Faktor and her co-founder Chris Sukornyk started Disco in 2020. Before Disco, Faktor worked as general manager and head of business at Wattpad, but left before the company was acquired by Naver Corp. in 2021 to create the Faktory Ventures seed fund. Faktory Ventures is now a division of the community group Gamechanger, which happened to be the inspiration for Disco.
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For his part, Sukornik is a six-time serial tech entrepreneur who founded Chango. The performance marketing startup was sold for $122 million to Rubicon Project in 2015. After the Chango sale, Sukornyk joined Mantella Venture Partners as a venture partner.
Disco closed a $6 million seed round in 2021. Investors in that round included Quiet Capital, Golden Ventures, Inovia, and GSV, as well as a number of angel investors, including Wattpad co-founder Ivan Yuen, Shopify’s Satish Kanwar, and Brandon Chu and Michele Romanow of Clearco.
What’s next for Disco? Like most startups today, talk of Web3 and the metaverse abounds: the company says NFT certificates, wallet integration, and crypto payment protocols are on its 2022 product roadmap.
“If you think about what the experience is today from the way we live together, we think this is a very early version of where the learning metauniverse will eventually be,” Factor said. “We think we’ll continue to innovate and think about how we can learn to live together in a virtual metaverse.”
Main image of Margaret Atwood courtesy of Disco.
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