Code.org, the organization backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates that aims to teach children how to program, has set a new fundraising record on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. On Tuesday, the nonprofit’s campaign surpassed the $2.5 million benchmark set in August, with 41 days left to raise $5 million in total.
The nonprofit organization, which says it has taught an hour of programming to 40 million students in 200 countries, is hoping to make a longer-lasting impact. Code.org has created full courses that are in 30,000 classrooms and trained 1,000 computer science teachers. The current Indiegogo campaign will help the organization further its goal by training 10,000 teachers, most of them at the elementary school level, and reach 100 million students. All contributions to Code.org are matched dollar-for-dollar by a group of donors, including Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman.
Since May, the fundraising platform has had seven campaigns raise more than $2 million, and the previous record was set by Stone Brewing Co. in August, said the company. These records, however, pale in comparison to Kickstarter’s blockbuster campaigns, including the Pebble smartwatch ($10 million), OUYA video game console ($8.6 million), and the Coolest Cooler, which managed to amass $13.3 million in donations for a cooler-blender-speaker hybrid.
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