A UK startup Academy, attracts, trains, and accelerates a new diverse generation of tech leaders against barriers of gender, ethnicity, and class.
Now, Academy has picked up $4 million seed funding in a round led by LocalGlobe along with participation from Emerge Education. Also, current and former leaders from tech giants such as Facebook, Microsoft, Slack, GoCardless, and Farfetch participated in the round. The funds will be used to build a talent and leadership infrastructure for the tech industry.
Ashley Ramrachia, founder and CEO of Academy said: “This funding round will help Academy to create that common talent and leadership infrastructure for the most ambitious companies.”
Saul Klein, co-founder of LocalGlobe, said: “Academy graduates are the future leaders of the tech sector’s best companies. Ash’s proven track record, dedication to the industry and his sheer determination to see people reach their full potential is awesome to behold and will bring huge dividends to those companies that partner with his team.”
Builds next-gen leaders
Academy was founded by Ashley Ramrachia, the former Chief People Officer at THG. Whilst at THG, Ramrachia pioneered a radical new model to meet the scaling needs of the company, building an internal technology and leadership academy that transformed raw tech potential into high-performance technologists.
Academy is working with aspiring tech talent and companies to build the next generation of tech leaders from diverse backgrounds. Its operations are modelled based on the career trajectories of its angel investors such as Ric Lewis (Chair of the Black Heart Foundation), Angie Ma (Chief People Officer at Faculty) and Wing Chan (former CTO of THG).
Also, its portfolio companies from Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Y Combinator and fast-growing public companies like Soho House are among those working with Academy to find and accelerate their future tech leaders.
The partners of the company gain exclusive access to a premium community of diverse future leaders in tech. It selects the top 0.5% of talent, which makes it more selective than Google, and 10x more competitive than Harvard.
Sharon Akaka, Founding Scholar at Academy, and junior full-stack developer at Beryl, said: “Academy is everything that I was looking for and more. A career in tech seemed closed to me without taking on debt for training, and I had accepted long evenings ahead as a self-taught engineer. Academy helped me to rapidly acquire the technical skills that I needed and gave me tools to accelerate my personal development and leadership ability.”
Focuses on diversity and performance
Academy does its selection based on diversity and performance. While it accepts only 0.5% of applicants, among them there are 50% female, over 60% from minority ethnic backgrounds and 30% are Black. It does this by cutting through economic barriers.
The training programme hosted by Academy is zero-tuition, grant-funded and remote-first, making anyone with an internet connection access it. Also, many of Academy’s trainees come from non-STEM backgrounds and the average employee salary is higher than Computer Science graduates from some leading universities in the UK.
Partnership with Beamery
Recently, Beamery entered the futurecorn category with a valuation of $800 million after its Series C round. It has been working with Academy to identify, train and accelerate future leaders in software engineering. It does this with ambitions of high performance and a high focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.
With this partnership, it nurtures both technical and leadership skills for new hires and existing employees, including workshops on mentoring, core technical training, and ongoing leadership coaching.
Already, seven individuals are joining Beamery in software engineering roles with this partnership. Eventually, it has achieved a cohort diversity of 57% female and 43% minority ethnic background.
Michael Paterson, co-founder and CTO at Beamery, said: “We partnered with Academy not only to help find brilliant future leaders, but to put repeatable systems and processes in place to ensure that a career, and not just a job, is available to all – whatever the academic or social background. Academy’s approach to combining diverse talent with a first-rate technical education aligns with Beamery’s aim of creating a more diverse, inclusive and equitable tech future.”
