Gran Cursos does M&A and enters programming, the ‘candy spot’ of schooling

Gran Cursos — an edtech of preparatory courses that already earns more than R$ 300 million — has just made a minority investment in SoulCode Academy, which works in the training of devs for businesses.

The transaction also includes a purchase option to acquire 100% of the capital, which can be exercised in up to six years.

The acquisition will allow Gran Cursos to diversify its income beyond the preparatory courses for public competitions, the market niche where it was born and grew up in the last ten years.

It also positions Gran Cursos in what is perhaps the ‘hottest’ and most demanded market in education today: programming courses.

“The lack of professionals in this area is brutal. It’s even difficult to quantify because it’s that story, if there were more professionals, the number of vacancies might even be higher,” Gabriel Granjeiro, the co-founder of Gran Cursos, told the Brazil Journal. “We wanted to get into this area and we saw that the best way would be to partner with a relevant player.”

SoulCode operates on a B2B model: students take the training for free and companies pay the bill, which hire SoulCode to help them fill their technology vacancies.

SoulCode already serves companies such as Accenture, KPMG, UOL, Santander, Raízen and Eletromidia.

The courses last from 3 to 4 months and add up to 800 course hours. The focus is both on the technical part of programming and on soft skill it is in English.

SoulCode receives more than 2,000 applications for every 50-student class it opens, said Carmela Borst, one of the founders and a former executive at Oracle.

Today, students who do not pass are sent to a free online platform to prepare for the selection process, developed by SoulCode itself.

With the transaction, the idea of ​​the two companies is to create a B2C platform for technology courses along the lines of what Alura does. This platform will have courses in various specialties – from frontend to backendfrom UX designer to data science — and at affordable prices.

The goal is to reach 100,000 subscribers to this platform in 2025, when the coding vertical should represent 15% to 20% of Gran Cursos’ revenue.

Today’s transaction comes just over a year after BTG Pactual invested R$105 million in Gran Cursos through its impact fund.

The idea with the round — the first in the history of Gran Cursos — was precisely to execute an M&As strategy focused on revenue diversification.

Since then, Gran Cursos has already purchased UniBagozzi, a university center in Curitiba that will serve as a platform for its expansion in higher education. The idea is to launch undergraduate and graduate courses online later this year.

Source: Brazil Journal