The Brazilian startup isaac, which develops solutions for the financial management of private schools, has just announced the raising of $125 million in a Series B round led by General Atlantic. Also signing the funding round were SoftBank Latin America Fund and venture capital firm Kaszek.
isaac was founded in the middle of pandemic 2020 by David Peixoto and Ricardo Sales, with the proposal of bringing to private schools a product that operationalizes all tuition payments and the receipt of monthly revenue for each institution.
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isaac handles the school’s receivables management, enabling tuition payments to be made digitally by various methods, such as PIX (the Brazilian instant payment system), credit card, or bank slip. The startup‘s platform also includes an interface for communication with the students’ families, through which it is possible to send pre-payment reminders.
“Today we are digitizing the entire tuition payment process for schools, which, for the most part, still operate based on bank slips, spending a lot of energy and providing a poor payment experience for their clients. Our solution also saves the maintainers time, which can now be allocated to more value-creating activities,” says Peixoto, isaac’s CEO.
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In a little over a year, isaac already has more than 400 client schools in 23 Brazilian states. The platform serves about 160,000 students and has already processed more than BRL 900 million in tuition fees. Despite the accelerated growth, isaac operates in a market formed by more than 40,000 private schools and almost 9 million students. The growth potential is, therefore, huge.
Peixoto explains that the startup came to with a payment solution with guaranteed revenue and now wants to deliver a more robust solution, integrating access to financial services with a state-of-the-art operating system customized for the specific operation of a school. Therefore, the newly infused capital will be used to expand the operation, with strong investment in technology and new products and in attracting talent to the team, which today has 450 employees.
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“isaac managed to innovate by designing an attractive business model with real impact. By offering financial predictability, isaac allows schools to be able to invest in their growth, and optimize the time of the maintainers,” says Martín Escobari, co-president, and head at General Atlantic in Latin America.
Besides SoftBank, General Atlantic, and Kaszek, the startup also has a minority investment from Arco Educação, which presents itself as the largest Brazilian company in the sector. Arco was the first company in Brazil to hold an IPO on Nasdaq.
