Peruvian Crehana raises largest Series B for edtech in Latin America, launches in Brazil

The $70 million General Atlantic-led round will fuel the company’s expansion in the region, Brazil included

Diego Olcese (CEO), and Rodolfo Dañino (COO), co-founders at Crehana. Photo: Courtesy

05.Aug.2021 14:38 BRT
UPDATED 15:17 BRT

Peru’s education platform focused on reskilling and upskilling Crehana announced on Thursday that it has raised $70 million in a Series B round led by General Atlantic, Latin America’s largest Series B funding for an education technology company.

The fundraising comes months after Crehana raised a $13 million Series A extension round in December 2020. Proceeds will go to expand its enterprise solution, launch operations in Brazil, and invest in new products and technologies.

This round brings Crehana’s total capital raised to $95 million. Other investors include Mountain Nazca, Salesforce Ventures, Rethink Education, ALIVE Ventures, IFC, and Dila Capital, among others.

The startup was founded by Diego Olcese (CEO), and Rodolfo Dañino (COO) in 2015, and currently works with more than 400 experts to offer over 700 courses. The company says it reached “a triple-digit growth” in 2020, and plans to continue to accelerate its growth, focusing on aggressively scaling Crehana for Business, its enterprise-grade learning ecosystem, throughout Latin America.

Crehana for Business operates on a cloud-based SaaS model, providing learning modules that can be packaged and priced according to the needs of its customers. Individual users can also buy subscriptions directly from the platform, starting at $100 per year.

“Our mission is to make career development universal and empower Latin American companies to effectively build their teams in the fast-paced world in which we’re living,” said Olcese. “Over the past 18 months, we’ve experienced record high growth, and we see the market only accelerating. Today, more than 50% of our revenues come from Crehana for Business. With this new capital, we aim to double down on deepening our skills and learning ecosystem for the enterprise. Our goal is to provide talent managers with automated machine learning and AI-driven tools that can enable effective understanding of the gaps on their teams and deliver the necessary value-added support to address them.”

As part of the transaction, Luis Cervantes and Zeev Thepris, Vice President at General Atlantic, will join Crehana’s Board of Directors. Crehana marks General Atlantic’s sixth investment in Mexico since 2014, when it first entered the country. Since then, GA has invested nearly $1 billion in high-growth Mexican companies.