San Francisco’s MasterClass is expanding its presence in Canada with an engineering hub in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.
The streaming platform that makes it possible for anyone to learn from the best just raised USD $225 million in Series F funding and will use that capital to further advance its strategic initiatives, including increased content production, international expansion and the launch of a new enterprise business in response to strong demand from both SMBs and large corporations.
The Waterloo-based technical teams will support these initiatives, including efforts such as building out the company’s enterprise product offering, building technical integrations with distribution partners and scaling technical and video infrastructure.
Local hires Matt Elgie, who held senior leadership roles at Barracuda FX, Broadway Technology and Sandvine, and James Spere, who held senior leadership roles at ProNavigator, Roadmunk and D2L, will be growing and leading the engineering, product and other technical teams in Canada.
MasterClass will hire engineers across the full development stack, including web, mobile, native and back-end infrastructure (core systems are built on Ruby on Rails), in addition to product managers, designers, technical program managers, data scientists and data engineers.
The company plans to expand its overall workforce to more than 500 employees in 2021, including growing the Canada office to become a peer engineering headquarters to the existing headquarters in San Francisco.
“As MasterClass has been experiencing rapid growth, we are scaling our platform, technology and products to meet the needs of our global consumer and enterprise user base,” said Paul Bankhead, chief product officer of MasterClass.
“I’ve had great experiences working with Waterloo-based technical teams and am excited to partner with Canada’s thriving and collaborative tech community to support this expansion.”
“I am delighted to welcome MasterClass to our community’s growing cluster of leading technology companies with strong global brands,” said Tony LaMantia, president and CEO of Waterloo EDC. “The Waterloo EDC team looks forward to supporting the company’s first international expansion outside of the U.S., including its integration into our ecosystem.”
MasterClass plans to have its first hires start remotely in June, with a physical office expected to come once it is safe to return to in-person work.