It’s official — Codeup, a tech career boot camp accelerator based in San Antonio has signed a lease on its new campus location in downtown Dallas two blocks from John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza at 701 Commerce Street.
Michael Girdley, Jason Straughan, and Chris Turner opened Codeup in 2013, offering its 20-week coding boot camp-style workforce development program for aspiring software developers. Since launching, the company has grown from its roots as a boot camp into a local institution focused on meeting demand for talent in San Antonio’s growing technology ecosystem.
“We have refined our curriculum, built our team, expanded our partnership network, and built a brand people can trust,” Jason Straughan, Codeup CEO wrote in a company blog post Friday. “Many of our competitors have closed or sold. We’re still Texas-based, owned by our founders, and our investment in quality has brought our graduate placement rate to 97% over the last 18 months.”
Director of development Dimitri Antoniou has been promoted to vice president of delivery. He will manage the new Dallas campus and oversee curriculum delivery at both locations.
“We are waiting for state approval for our new location and expect to launch the first cohort for full-stack web developers in early 2020,” Antoniou said.
Straughan recognized in 2018 how a focused expansion across Texas made sense for Codeup. With the 10th largest economy in the world and over 50 company headquarters from the Fortune 500 list, Codeup is targeting the four major cities of Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio — all major cities with high demand for tech talent.
“We are not creating a second Codeup, but we are opening another campus,” Straughan wrote. “Dallas jumped to the top of our list to start with because we’ve already placed our graduates there at companies like USAA and Cognizant for average starting salaries of $86,666.”
Over the past five years of operation, Codeup has expanded its initial curriculum full-stack web developers offering by adding a new course to train data scientists, due to high demand. The first data science cohort graduated 17 students in June. The second class has 21 students with a graduation date in January 2020.
Read more: Codeup Launches Data Science Program to Meet Demand in San Antonio
“We saw an explosion in employer need for data scientists here but not much supply,” Antoniou said. “The demand mirrors the growth for these skills elsewhere in the country.”
Those interested in Codeup’s program offerings for the Dallas program can sign up to be notified when the first web developer cohort will begin accepting applicants, Antoniou said.
“We’ve never raised capital, even for this expansion. This move is driven solely from the high demand for our graduates and is funded through retained earnings from our success in San Antonio,” Straughan told Startups San Antonio. “Codeup was born at Geekdom, in the heart of the San Antonio tech district. Being able to gain traction, grow into our own space, fill two floors in downtown, and now expand into another market just proves that the San Antonio startup scene is maturing.”
Featured image: Codeup San Antonio is located in the downtown Vogue Building Photo credit: Startups San Antonio.
