Lynda.com Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Bruce Heavin and co-founder and Executive Chair Lynda Weinman at the company’s Carpinteria headquarters. (Business Times file photo)

Making a $1.5 billion bet on providing improved content to professionals, social networking platform LinkedIn is acquiring Carpinteria-based Lynda.com in a cash and stock deal.

Based in Mountain View, LinkedIn has joined the ranks of social media behemoths by focusing on career development and networking. The acquisition of Lynda.com will give it access to the South Coast company’s library of training videos, its global customer base and a cadre of talented artists and personalities who produce its training materials.

The sale caps a year of fast-paced activity for co-founders Lynda Weinman and her husband Bruce Haven. They have raised private equity capital, restructured the company and rolled out new products aimed at boosting their subscription-based service.

Lynda.com, one of the fastest-growing firms in the Tri-Counties, employs about 600 people in the region and generated $100 million in revenue in 2012, the last year the company disclosed its finances. It has been profitable since two years after its founding in Ojai in 1995. The company is now located on a 12-acre campus in Carpinteria, with additional offices in San Francisco and Calabasas.

The firm started as a self-teaching resource for creative professionals looking to learn web design and other software, but has since become a major player in supplying instructional materials to government, educational and business groups. Google, Yahoo, Apple and Adobe are among its customers.

Editor’s note: The photo caption above was corrected to identify the company’s co-founder and CIO Bruce Heavin and not CEO Eric Robison, which it had previously indicated.