See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based TribeUniv, the company behind the online programming lecture service CodeCamp, announced today that it has raised about 40 million yen (or $400,000) from CyberAgent Ventures.

Tribe-Univ was formed during the fifth edition of Incubation Camp, an intensive two-day business development program for entrepreneurs organized by Japan’s Incubate Fund. Following their $30,000 funding from Incubate Fund last July, they launched the learning platform last October.

The startup boasts a former Cybird employee previously in charge of training new employees at that company, who has developed curriculum at Tribe-Univ for a programming course. Since launching six months ago, the course has acquired more learners than initially expected, most of whom are entirely new to programming. To better serve such people, the company recently also launched new courses in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Jquery.

Even non-engineers often need to have some basic technical understanding of programming in order to efficiently communicate with engineers. To that end, many website directors or designers have applied to join courses, accounting for about 80% of all learners. CodeCamp provides lectures by professional programmers on a one-to-one basis in contrast to typical online learning services, so a student may progress faster than if he or she studied at a conventional school.

The company’s CEO Hironobu Ikeda told us that they expect to have 1,500 students by next March. In addition to user acquisition, they have also started approaching companies to let them adopt the platform for in-house employee training. That initiative has gotten a good response this far.

Regarding the variety of languages, we understand they may add new courses for mobile development later on. If you have struggled to learn programming before, you may want to try CodeCamp. Note that it’s only available in Japanese.