Crehana - Edtech Platform
Founded in 2015, Crehana is the leading edtech platform in Latin America
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Snapshot
Founded in 2015, Peru-headquartered Crehana is an online education platform that aims to provide over 800 courses in 16 categories. It caters to companies and individuals looking to close the reskilling and upskilling gap in Latin America. The platform consists of more than 400 Spanish-speaking professionals and instructors who help users develop and refine digital and creative skills.
Crehana has managed to cover the entire value chain from discovering and analyzing the skill gap, to offering courses to help upskill individuals as well as providing the feature to track their progress. As a result, users on the platform are able to master new tools of the trade as well as stay updated with the constantly changing industry demands.
The company’s latest funding was in October 2021, where it raised $70M in a Series B funding round led by General Atlantic. This was by far the largest Series B funding round in Latin America for an edtech company. It experienced triple-digit growth in 2020 and is supported by marquee investors like General Atlantic, Mountain Nazca, Salesforce Ventures, Rethink Education, ALIVE Ventures, IFC, and Dila Capital, among others.
Business Overview & Products
Crehana offers project-based courses in Spanish in the following categories:
Digital Marketing
Digital Illustration
Leadership
Soft Skills
Graphic Design
Drawing and Painting
Digital Transformation and Innovation
Data and Analytics
Sales
Design of Products
Photography
Video
Productivity and Software
Entrepreneurship and Business
Lifestyle
Crafts and Cooking
Web Development and Technology
3D Modeling and Animation
2D Animation
Administration and Finance
Service and Customer Service
Digital Architecture
While the company’s headquarters are in Lima, Crehana has footprints in Latin American locations like Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Spain.
How It Works
As an education platform, Crehana provides highly curated Spanish online courses to individuals and companies with an aim to revolutionize education for creatives. Companies use this platform to develop their enterprise’s talent by upskilling them and in the long run, increasing the performance of their teams.
It offers project-based courses that are spread across 16 categories like digital marketing, graphic design, animation, leadership and craft courses. These courses are between 3-8 hours so that students find it easier. The short video classes are proven to generate 22% greater recall as compared to traditional education methods. Users are also provided reports measuring their progress so they can plan their study sessions accordingly.
Users that sign up for Crehana’s premium membership get access to a personalized and specialized mentor who accompanies them throughout the course. Moreover, users can also schedule personalized sessions with mentors to resolve any academic queries that they may have about their project. For urgent questions, they have access to a chatbox from Monday to Friday where these instructors are available to communicate with them.
At the end of each course, students are assigned personalized projects to ensure they have successfully mastered the skill they were taught. After the mentors review projects, they provide feedback to users on whether or not additional skill development is needed.
Once the course is complete, users receive certificates signed by educational partners of the platform. These certificates can be shared on social media platforms or uploaded on the Crehana website to validate the user’s course completion journey.
Instructors and professionals share their knowledge by teaching online courses while Crehana handles their fees payment and marketing expenses. The platform also has a profile page for each teacher, so before selecting a course, students have the option to review the profile page of their teachers and evaluate their portfolio, degree, and work experience.
Crehana Careers is launched for digital professionals who are looking to either enhance their skills or increase their employment opportunities. These new courses are aimed at developing in-demand creative skills and focus on topics like digital illustration, 3D modeling, motion graphics and more.
To simplify the learning process, these courses are designed in a way that students can finish them quickly. Each career has five modules with 2-3 courses of 3 hours duration. If a user spends 8 hours per week for four months on Crehana, they are able to learn skills that help them score better jobs.
Business Model & Pricing
Crehana has a B2B2C model where it caters to both individuals and businesses through its online education platform. In order to target business owners, the company launched Crehana for Business which provides a cloud-based learning ecosystem along with numerous learning modules that can be priced and adjusted according to the needs of users.
The platform has a subscription-based model where users that buy the premium model get special privileges like exclusive online specializations, access to all courses, mentoring services, academic advising, personalized chat support, access for multiple users, exclusive call support, etc. Individuals can get a subscription for $69/ per annum, whereas duos or families have to pay a higher price of over $100.
Crehana earns revenue from the subscription fee it charges customers that sign up for a premium membership. The company claims that 50% of its revenue comes from Crehana for Business, which targets businesses looking to upskill their staff.
Traction
Crehana experienced triple digit growth in 2020 as the world went online due to the pandemic. It also claimed 4x year over year growth during 2019 and 2020. Amidst so many businesses shutting down, people moved towards online education platforms where they could learn new skills that open up employment opportunities for them. This is why the company experienced massive growth during the coronavirus lockdown.
Crehana prides itself on helping learners double their income after taking courses on the platform. According to a recent analysis, 60% of professionals who spend 3-4 hours/week on the platform are able to quickly find new jobs either permanent or freelance. Whereas 80% of active users get twice the amount of offers every month.
According to statistics on the website:
The company has more than 400 experts on board
It offers more than 800 courses in 22 categories
These courses teach 100,000+ techniques and competencies
The company was reported to have 5 million users in 2020 and the app was downloaded more than 500,000 times.
Founder(s)
Diego Olcese Diaz: Ceo and Co-founder of Crehana. Previously co-founded Flikn, an online education marketplace that enables users to learn and share skills
Rodolfo Dañino Ruiz: COO and Co-founder of Crehana. Previously co-founded Flikn, an online education marketplace, and served as a cohort member at Emerge Education, a leading ed-tech seed-stage investor.
History & Evolution
In 2013, Diego Olcese, a young graduate became infatuated with the idea of technology changing workplaces after visiting corporations like Google and Coursera. That combined with his fascination for the internet facilitating access to education, motivated Diego to create a virtual space where users could find helpful content to improve their career trajectory.
In 2015, Diego and Rodolfo Dañino founded Crehana, an educational platform that provides short courses to help customers develop technical skills. These are for particular projects like how to use social media to boost business, graphic design for advertising, interpret sales projection data and more.
In 2018, the company launched its IOS and Android apps in a bid to make its platform more accessible to students. Courtesy of the app, users can learn both online and offline wherever and whenever they want. They can also download videos and material for times when they do not have access to the internet.
That year the company also launched career courses to educate students in creative skills. The aim was to help learners who wanted to enhance their digital skills or increase employment opportunities by engaging them in short practical courses.
Along with the launch of new courses and apps, the company also expanded to Spain to maximize its reach globally.
The company experienced tremendous growth during the coronavirus pandemic with a 48% increase in browsing time with tablets and a 36% increase in mobile phone traffic. Crehana partnered with Peru’s University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) to offer specialist courses to its users to meet their ever-growing demand. As a result, the platform exceeded 3.5 million users in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2021, with Crehana’s recent Series B funding, it planned to use the funds to launch operations in Brazil.
From archive.org
Market Snapshot
The edtech market in Latin America is the 4th largest edtech market in the world. By 2023, it is estimated to earn a revenue of more than $3B growing at a CAGR of more than 4% from 2018 to 2023.
The largest users of self-paced learning in the Latin American market are countries such as the Dominican Republic, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, and Chile. Brazil is the largest player in the edtech market of Latin America.
Additional Learnings
Crehana has experts like Dore Hernandez, the Head of Small Business Sales at Google, Francis Serbia, Senior Product Manager at Amazon, Michael Castuera, Coach and HR Executive at Uber, Melissa Lucero, Head of Ecommerce and CRM at Loreal on board so that students on the platform can directly learn from industry experts.
Marcus Dantus, businessman and investor shark of the Sony Channel program Shark Tank Mexico partnered with Crehana to introduce a new course called ‘Attract and convince investors with Marcu Dantus’ with an aim to develop skills of entrepreneurs so they can synthesize and pitch an idea to investors in a company.
The majority of the students are from Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Spain and Argentina.
Suggested starting points to dive deeper
Latin Entrepreneurs: Diego Olcese, founder of Crehana (The Latin Way, January ‘22)
As edtech evolves, LatAm reskilling platforms raise millions to bring outcomes into the mix | TechCrunch (Natasha Mascarenhas, TeChcrunch, August‘ 21)
Can you be taught how to be creative? This Peru startup thinks so (Sam Brake Guia, Peru Reports, May‘18)