One Month acquires GoRails to expand its coding courses

GoRails is a one-man resource for learning to code with Ruby on Rails, and coding startup One Month thinks it’s pretty great.

In fact, it thinks it’s so great, that One Month has acquired GoRails, the companies are announcing today. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

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GoRails founder — and human Swiss Army knife — Chris Oliver is joining the One Month team in New York, where he’ll continue to develop the GoRails product and community.

In 2013, Mattan Griffel and Chris Castiglione founded One Month Rails, an online course to learn basic Ruby on Rails coding. Eventually, the New York City-based startup broadened its scope and became simply One Month, an education library of coding and other skills that can be learned in a month. Each course comes with instructional videos, sample codes, setup instructions and tools, and access to support.

Similarly, GoRails provides screencasts of various Ruby on Rails lessons and topics, helping developers learn how to do certain things and discover new tricks and more efficient methods. RailsCasts is another site offering similar video-based tutorials.

“It’s a really interesting opportunity for us to expand what we offer,” Griffel told VentureBeat in an interview.

GoRails will remain largely independent, on its own website, acting as an extension of One Month’s courses while benefitting from its new home’s resources like its video studio. It will also provide a more intermediate level of materials that One Month graduates can move onto.

“The thing that we’ve always been missing is ‘what do people do after [One Month’s Ruby on Rails courses]?’” Griffel said. He added that the startup often sees students joining after they’ve learned all they could from Codecademy, Treehouse, and the like, and GoRails can be the third rung in this ladder.

This acquisition is also the beginning of a few things One Month has on its roadmap, including the release at the end of the month of its Learning Library, a “huge library of free video content” about coding, as Griffel described it.

Next quarter, One Month will start building out its sales team and start to talk more seriously to colleges and high schools about providing its content to their students, especially now that it has a broader range of skill levels. It’s also going to continue to look for acquisitions that can help it expand even more.

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“There’s a lot of awesome classes and franchises … that are kind of undervalued,” Griffel said.

“It’s an interesting opportunity to go around and roll them into one. As long as we keep finding stuff like that, we’ll keep buying it,” he said.

And to do all of this, the company is, of course, raising some new money, though Griffel declined to share more details other than the company was nearly done with the fundraise. It raised a little under $800,000 in 2013 after participating in Y Combinator’s Summer 2013 batch.