The company has the classic tech story of being created in a garage by its founders Chris Eigeland, Andrew Barnes, Chris Hood and Vu Tran. But it  has become a global business operating in six countries after winning more than $100 million in investment since 2015 and now has investors like Softbank, Microsoft’s venture capital arm M12, Madrona Venture Group, Salesforce Ventures and SEEK.

Its unicorn status is based on achieving the $US1 billion valuation – a feat achieved by about 600 around the world including SpaceX and Robinhood. The term unicorn refers to rarity of successful startups.

It operates about 200 online corporate training libraries and Eigeland has been quoted as saying the company’s aim was to create “the Spotify or Netflix of training” for small and medium business.

The capital raising adds to the booming strength of the Brisbane tech sector which entrepreneur Bevan Slattery described recently as “awesome”.

The AFR reported that Go1’s Series D funding round was led by new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2, alongside existing backers AirTree Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, with additional participation from Blue Cloud Ventures, Larsen Ventures, Scott Shleifer and John Curtius from Tiger Global, and TEN13.

It is believed to be one of the biggest funding rounds in Australia and follows the capital raising by fellow Queenslanders Octopus Deploy ($US172 million) and SafetyCulture $US99 million.

Go1 has benefitted recently from the boom in online training brought about by pandemic restrictions.

The funding is expected to be used to expand further into Europe and Asia Pacific.

The company is understood to have about 3.5 million users with companies like Microsoft, TikTok, the University of Oxford, Suzuki, Asahi and Thrifty, on its books.

The user base has been reported to have grown by 300 per cent in the past year.