Coworking and edtech company Talent Garden acquires Hyper Island to expand online courses globally – TechCrunch

Talent Garden is a kind of “European-WeWork-meets-General-Assembly” in that its business model is a combination of coworking spaces (in places like Italy, Austria, Romania, among others ) and online/offline digital courses. It is also a post-Series B company (its last round was $73.5 million), having raised from investors such as 500 Global and Social Capital. He upped his game even further with the acquisition of a majority stake (54%) in hyper island – a place some Europeans regard as the continent’s “digital Harvard university”.

Hyper Island emerged in the 90s as a school of excellence in the emerging world of UX and game design and has gone on to produce a huge roster of talent, which is regularly sucked in by the biggest tech players.

Combining the two will undoubtedly increase the ability of both to scale their courses online (and offline, if applicable).

For example, Talent Garden offers a myriad of business training courses for the digital world, handling approximately 20,000 students per year. Likewise, Hyper Island is traditionally best known for its online education, but with Talent Garden, that online component will undoubtedly be expanded. Talent Garden also has 20 campuses across Europe.

Talent Garden co-founder Rasa Strumskyte told me:

Over 60% of our courses are online with the rest on campus and we will work to expand existing courses to more markets and create new ones, especially online.

It is estimated that some 97 million new digital jobs will emerge over the next few years, with the global digital education market expected to grow from $8.4 billion in 2020 to $33.2 billion by 2025. makes it one of the fastest growing sectors in the post-pandemic era.

Hyper Island has a global presence operating in Europe, Asia-Pacific, North and South America through physical locations in the UK, Singapore, USA and Brazil.

The combined entity says it has forecast revenues of 50 million euros in 2022, 20,000 professionals trained per year, 5,000 students placed on the job market “with a placement rate of 98% and more than 4,500 startups and digital innovators as teachers and community members”. ”

Davide Dattoli, co-founder and executive chairman of Talent Garden said:

By partnering with Hyper Island, our project takes another leap forward. In such a large but fragmented market, we are [as ready as] never before to act as aggregators and game changers. We will expand our training offerings to benefit many current and future workers who are going through this time of digital transition.

Irene Boni, new CEO of Talent Garden, said: “Talent Garden has the opportunity to grow significantly in the digital education market in Europe, also by training individuals as well as large companies who wish to take advantage of the digitization, which is certainly a technological issue, but above all a question of human capital.

Before joining Talent Garden, Boni worked for 10 years at the unicorn YOOX Net-a-Porter (now part of the luxury group Richemont) as co-CEO. Before that, she worked at McKinsey.

Fredrick Mansson, President of Hyper Island, said, “Through the alliance with Talent Garden, we will jointly obtain a substantial increase in resources to accelerate both the growth and impact of businesses around the world.”