Hi everyone. Welcome to Tech Check Plus. I'm Julia Borsen. I'm so excited to be talking today to Guild co-founder and CEO Rachel Romer Carlson. Thank you so much for talking to us today. Thanks for having me, Julia.

So Rachel, you're joining us now because you had big news just out today. a big fundraise. Walk us through the announcement.

Yeah, we were thrilled today to announce our Series F fundraise. We raised $175 million from some great

investors like Wellington, obviously a big, large institutional investor, really great work with

pensions across the U.S. and also excited to

announce that Oprah joined Team Guild as an investor as well. So it's an exciting day for us and

also just an important one in terms of securing our financial future. Yeah, I mean, you've raised

quite a bit of money now.

Obviously, this is your biggest fundraise yet. Tell us a little bit about your valuation now and

how much that's grown in recent years. Yeah, so the valuation grow moderately with this round.

I'll note, you know, we weren't aiming to optimize for that. We were really optimizing for

having the rainy day savings account that I think every long-term. note, you know, we weren't aiming to optimize for that. We were really optimizing for having

the rainy day savings account that I think every long-term oriented company needs to have.

But this does put us at a 4.4 billion valuation, and we're grateful to be continuing to grow

and create value. But we tend to think of our value, first and foremost, in terms of what our learners and our members and our partners tell us we're doing in terms of creating value for them and then think about valuation second.

So let's take a step back and explain what is Guild education. Some people have called it an ed tech company. You say it's more of an HR ed tech company. Explain to us

who your customers are and how you work with these different groups. You are serving students,

people who want to learn, and they are employees. And you're also working with their employers

to help them. Explain the whole ecosystem. Yeah, it's probably easiest to start with our mission,

which is to

unlock economic opportunity for America's workforce through education. So it is right to think about

a big part of our means as education. We help frontline Americans access education, skilling,

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