Alura, Brazil’s largest programming education platform, has grand expansion plans

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In 2004, the Silveira brothers, Paulo and Guilherme, founded Alura, a small programming school that taught a half-dozen students concepts like open-source, agile, and the Java language.

Sixteen years later, Alura is Brazil’s largest programming education platform, with 250 employees and over 70,000 active students. The company has generated R$73 (US$14) million in revenue last year and expects R$110 million in revenue and R$55 million in EBITDA this year.

Alura moved to the digital education model in 2013 but still has two physical schools in São Paulo. The platform now offers more than 1,300 courses, ranging from more traditional languages, like Python and HTML, to data science and machine learning courses.

However, Alura’s strongest growth is in the B2B space: the company began exploring contracts with businesses about three years ago, and today this area already accounts for 50% of revenue.

The tech market is advancing rapidly, and Alura wants to keep up.

That is why it acquired a couple of months ago a stake in São Paulo-based PM3, a reference company for product management training in Brazil. The edtech merger is aimed to train new programmers and move the product management market.

PM3 has only been in the market for three years and has seen 240% growth in the last year, and has more than four thousand students seeking training in a rapidly expanding field, digital product management.

With trainers and experts working at companies such as iFood, Easynvest, OLX Brazil, Nubank, Creditas, and Loft, PM3 sees great potential to impact digital product development in Brazil mostly for small and medium-sized companies.

Now Alura is in the accreditation process with the Ministry of Education to create a university that should open its doors (virtually) by the end of the year.

Plans call for four technology degree programs: an undergraduate degree program, and three MBA programs – in data science, product management, and systems architecture.

In its 16 years of existence, Alura has had only two investment rounds. In the first, in 2016, R$40 million was raised by Crescera and Seek, an Australian company that owns Catho in Brazil and is an investor in Coursera. Last year, the same shareholders put more money into the company, which is used for mergers and acquisitions.

Alura also plans to expand its platform to other Latin American countries and offer technology courses in Spanish.

The company has increasingly invested in boot camps, specialized and advanced courses in areas focused on front-end and data science.

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