Hungarian-based Green Fox Academy raises $1.5 million

Green Fox Academy, a school in Budapest and Prague, has raised around $1.5 million from Impact Ventures. They have received a total of $1.6 million in funding over two rounds. The investor in this round, Impact Ventures, is a Berlin-based impact investment fund that provides venture capital to social enterprises whose business results are accompanied by a positive social impact. The current investment is one of the biggest dedicated impact investments of the region.

Founded in 2015 by Kristóf Bárdos, Barbara Fazekas, Tamás Kökény, and Péter Langmá, Green Fox is aimed to make non-programmers into programmers in four months and then help their successfully graduated students to find a job. Also, the academy provides boot camps for junior programmer courses. At this moment, Green Fox Academy is preparing over 160 students for their new career path in its classrooms in Budapest and Prague.

The academy is planning to use the investment for further international expansion. They wanted to open more schools in the region, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they started accepting applications from abroad online. Another goal of the investment is to finance the ‘post-payment’ option. It means that courses become available to applicants who otherwise would not be able to afford it. After participants have successfully completed the course, they have to pay a fixed portion of their monthly salary towards tuition fees, which means a manageable monthly amount that anyone can pay.

Péter Langmár, the co-founder of Green Fox Academy, said:

“We started Green Fox in 2015 because we wanted to help those motivated, talented young people who wished to start a career in the field of IT because they could not progress in their previous jobs – lacking either financial progress or the opportunity for long-term development. I personally saw several similar examples in my own environment. Although I found my place in IT, I had several friends working in other fields who found it hard to get along, some of them even moved abroad.”