LatAm List – The Colombian online education platform will expand into the Brazilian and Spanish markets this year.
Freddy Vega, Platzi’s CEO, and Christian van der Henst, COO, created the online tech school in Colombia in 2013 when he noticed a lack of professional programmers in Colombia and Latin America.
The platform teaches courses on design, marketing, and programming with a high 70% completion rate, far above most similar platforms. After one year studying with Platzi, students’ incomes tend to increase by 54% – 260%.
“We want the next generation of entrepreneurs to train with Platzi, and for our countries to have tech service based economies,” says Vega in a La Republica interview.
The company closed 2018 with almost one million registered students on their platform, and has established a strong presence in companies that used Platzi to train their employees. Now they are the main online education providers for Colombia’s Ministry of Technology.
For their future expansion, the platform started to create content in Portuguese, and they opened an office in Spain. The company expects to have a turnover increase of 300% after the expansion.
The majority of Platzi’s students are in Colombia and Mexico, followed by Chile, United States, and Argentina.
Read more on La Republica and Crunchbase, or listen to this podcast episode with Christian van der Henst.