Aussie startup JDoodle secures $3.2m in seed funding

Australian software startup JDoodle has obtained $3.2 million in seed funding to help it continue shaping computer science education.

[L-R] Mike Nicholls, Partner at Main Sequence and Gokul Chandrasekaran, Founder and CEO at JDoodle.

The funding round, led by Main Sequence will enable JDoodle to expand the business with a local team in Australia while fuelling its innovation efforts to cater to an ambitious target of reaching 8 million users within the next 12 months.

Currently, JDoodle has 800,000 active users globally and 3,000 educational institutions using the platform.

JDoodle said it is on a mission to turbocharge the software development industry with a comprehensive ecosystem of tools to support developers at every stage of their journey — from learning to code in schools and universities to finding employment and working on major tech projects in the business world.

At its core, JDoodle empowers students and developers to write and run code effortlessly in their browsers and devices, eliminating the need for local software or libraries.

By preloading multiple complex software libraries directly from the cloud, JDoodle democratises access to programming resources, which the company said makes it easier to teach, learn and develop software, while saving valuable time and resources.

Gokul Chandrasekaran, founder at JDoodle said, “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 percent of any organisation’s software funding.

“What the industry needs is a platform that unifies learners, teachers, practitioners, recruiters and organisations. And that’s what JDoodle does; it brings everyone together and turbocharges the whole industry.”

Last year, Chandrasekaran participated in UNSW’s 10x Accelerator Founders Program, which helps startups get investment ready. Here, it attracted the attention of deep tech venture firm Main Sequence.

Mike Nicholls, partner at Main Sequence said, “When we heard the JDoodle story, bootstrapping the business to nearly a million users per month, we were amazed. 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.”