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Sydney-based software development platform JDoodle, which already boasts 800,000 users globally, has raised $3.2 million in seed funding to grow its customer base to eight million over the next 12 months.
The seed funding round, led by Main Sequence, will be used by the company to expand its Australian team and grow a business that until now had been bootstrapped by founder Gokul Chandrasekaran.
The former software developer, who previously worked as an associate director of KPMG Australia, has been tinkering with the business for the past seven years and officially established JDoodle last year.
The business had grown from a $20 weekend side hustle into a platform that currently supports about 3,000 educational institutions globally.
JDoodle, which has made significant inroads into the education and recruitment sector, offers users tools to support software developers from learning to code in schools and universities to finding employment and working on major tech projects.
The platform says it is democratising access to programming resources, ‘making it easier than ever to teach, learn and develop software, while saving valuable time and resources’.
After growing to 800,000 users in the past year, reaching 500,000 by just word of mouth, Chandrasekaran says JDoodle is tapping into growing demand for its services.
“As a former software developer, I’ve seen first-hand the problems and inefficiencies facing my peers when it comes to learning about code or building the latest products,” he says.
“Devs, computer-science students, teachers and recruiters are all handcuffed by a tangle of expensive tools that currently make learning about and building software inefficient.
“Even in this AI era, software developers spend at least one month of their time just setting up and managing their software development environments — wasting around 20 per cent of any organisation’s software funding.”
Chandrasekaran says JDoodle is a platform that ‘unifies learners, teachers, practitioners, recruiters and organisations’.
“It brings everyone together and turbocharges the whole industry,” he says.
Chandrasekaran gained the attention of Main Sequence last year after participating in The University of New South Wales’ 10x Accelerator Founders Program.
“When we heard the JDoodle story, bootstrapping the business to nearly a million users per month, we were amazed,” Main Sequence partner Mike Nicholls says.
“JDoodle has democratised access to the tools that the next generation of developers need to be competitive. The proof is in the platform’s user growth.
“Gokul has spent the last seven years taking user feedback and building the tools they want to use to the point where it has now become one of the most popular coding platforms on the web.”
Nicholls says the investment in JDoodle is backed by major trends in software development with the industry expected to double in size globally by 2030 and the number of developers expected to surge from 27 million to 45 million. The industry is also being powered by a rise in AI-powered tools.
“Recent surveys show that 95 per cent of developers are now using AI-powered development tools,” Nicholls says.
“With these two trends occurring simultaneously, developers and businesses clearly need to turbocharge their software development capabilities or they will be out-competed quickly.
“JDoodle has one of the largest developer communities using its platform to learn how to code, and so our objective is to turn them into super developers and turbocharge their productivity from learner to seasoned developer.”Get our daily business news
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