NYU Ventures has contributed to a $1.5m seed round for Vidcode, co-founded by an alumna from the university.

Vidcode, a US-based platform that teaches teenagers how to code, has raised $1.5m in a seed round that included NYU Ventures, the investment fund of New York University, according to TechCrunch.

The round included educational content provider BrainPop, ZhenFund, Rethink Education, CoVenture, Evan Korth Syndicate, Cherry Ventures and Stephano Kim.

Vidcode has created a platform to teach teenagers how to write code, relying on users’ existing interests such as memes, games and video-making to make the process more entertaining. For example, last summer Vidcode ran a competition to develop a geofilter for messaging platform Snapchat.

The platform is currently used in 25,000 schools across states including New York, California, Arkansas, Kansas and Texas. The startup was co-founded by Alexandra Diracles, an alumna of New York University, Leandra Tejedor and Melissa Halfon.

The money will help develop more strategic partnerships and boost the offering to include augmented and virtual reality coding, as well as other advanced coding.

Vidcode previously obtained $100,000 from Intel Capital, the corporate venturing arm of semiconductor producer Intel, in 2015 when it took part in the corporate’s Intel Education Accelerator, and graduated from Y Combinator’s accelerator in 2016.