By Riley Kaminer
The American dream continues for Carlos Raul, Yamel Barroso, and Yusnier Viera: the three Cuban natives who landed in Miami and founded EducUp, a freemium platform for learning everything from foreign languages to math, coding, and college prep.
Since Refresh Miami spoke to the team in January 2022, the platform has grown to 1.6 million users and 22 employees, 7 of whom are based in South Florida, EducUp reports. EducUp recently joined AWS’s Impact Accelerator that is focused on Latino founders, along with fellow South Florida startups Lazo and Monadd. AWS provides members of its cohorts a wide range of support, including mentors, technical insights, AWS credits, and more.
As part of the program, EducUp received a non-dilutive $225,000 grant. “That’s amazing for us,” Raul said. “The mentors have been great, the sessions have been excellent, and we’ve made some important connections.” The eight-week program culminates next week with a pitch day presenting to investors in New York.
Raul explained that the timing of joining the AWS accelerator was perfect for EducUp, as they were in the midst of finalizing a new product called EducUp Studio. This offering is an AI-powered platform that enables educators to create gamified courses quickly and painlessly.
The idea is that creators can upload their video content to EducUp Studio and then easily reformat it into a course. From there, the creator can then start selling it through EducUp’s platform.
Not only does this create a new revenue stream for creators. It also provides value to EducUp, since the company takes around a 25% cut of proceeds. It has also enabled EducUp to expand its platform to offer upwards of 100 courses, having grown from 30 online educators to more than 100.
For now, the platform is in private beta to ensure that EducUp maintains the quality of its courses. “We want to make sure that we only attract high-quality, world-class educators,” Raul said. But he signaled that a public version of the platform will be launched in the coming weeks.
Miami has played a major role in EducUp’s growth. Raul said participating in local OnDeck and Endeavor Miami programs played a fundamental role in enabling EducUp’s early growth. Felipe Sommer, co-founder of Nearpod, is one of EducUp’s investors and advisors.
EducUp’s platform gamifies the process of education and keeps students engaged by giving them achievements, points, levels, and daily goals. The platform is available in an ever-expanding series of languages including English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.
“This is a new phase of growth for us, and it’s where our vision is actually coming alive,” Raul said.
He shared the team’s ambitious goal is to expand to 20,000 online educators in the next few years, as well as continuing to grow their offerings. Raul also said to watch out for EducUp’s upcoming B2B offering – helping companies with employee training.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- Education saved these Cuban founders’ lives. Now they’re building an EdTech startup to give back
- Moving? Monadd manages mail, subscriptions, services and more
- MAJORITY expands migrant-focused fintech offerings, with an additional $9.75M in tow
- EdTech Flo-Ops brings together students’ social and academic lives to improve their performance inside the classroom
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