Poliglota, a Chilean EdTech firm plans expansion across Latin America

Chilean EdTech firm Poliglota had to rapidly change its business model during the Covid-19 pandemic.  In normal times, it arranges physical meetups so students can congregate at cafeterias across Latin America to learn new languages.  Facing lockdown the company had to quickly shift their meetups online and focus on English.

Based in Santiago, Poliglota was founded in 2012 as a language learning platform.  Before the outbreak of the virus, the company had been operating in Peru and Mexico.  However, as a result of surging demand, Poliglota now operates in Nicaragua and Colombia.  In recent months it has witnessed an increase in its user base of more than 25% each month and it is hoping to turnover more than US$ 4 million in 2020.  Poliglota is also planning an investment round to fund further growth and expansion.

“ As soon as we knew this crisis was coming, on March 15, we sat down with our entire team and knew we had to shift gears very quickly…We’d been arranging over 1,500 monthly sessions where people physically met up in hundreds of cafeterias throughout Latin America and this [outbreak] was a death sentence for our model. ” Nicolás Fuenzalida, Co-Founder, Poliglota

Poliglota works with a number of corporations, including JP Morgan, Amazon, Apple, Santandar, Shell-Enex and Accenture.  The additional funding will help it establish a base in a number of Latin American cities, such as Sao Paulo, Bogotá and Buenos Aires.

“ However, we had a very social and interactive system, with great technological development. The heart of it all is the method we use to teach, measure, monitor, and adjust learning. Our obsession is the impact for people to achieve their goals. That is the true value of our algorithm. ” Nicolás Fuenzalida, Co-Founder, Poliglota

More information can be accessed here: https://www.poliglota.org/cl/

You can read more about EdTech here: https://global-edtech.com/edtech-definitions-products-and-trends/