After raising $6 million in mid-2011, San Diego’s TakeLessons says today it has raised another $4 million to improve its online services for music teachers and students, and to move into related markets.
The follow-on Series A financing, led by Triangle Peak Partners of Palo Alto, CA, brings the company’s total venture funding to more than $12 million. Siemer Ventures joined in the expanded funding, along with existing investors San Francisco-based Crosslink Capital and SoftTech VC of Palo Alto, CA.
In a statement from the company, founder and CEO Steve Cox says, “this new investment will aid our continued growth and leadership in the music space and will fuel our platform expansion into new marketplaces, including tutoring and the other performing arts.”
Cox, a musician former executive at San Diego’s CollegeClub.com, founded the startup in 2006 to operate as a Web platform and online marketplace that connects certified music instructors to students in more than 3,000 U.S. cities. The company’s Online Lesson platform enables students to search for a teacher by location, instrument, availability, background, and age. Students can arrange an in-person lesson or schedule one online.
In addition to expanding its music education services, TakeLessons plans to provide an online marketplace for tutoring this month in San Diego, expanding into Austin, Las Vegas, Sacramento, and Denver by the end of March.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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