Blog 3: Aprende Institute

Advancing practical and vocational skills for enterprising Spanish speakers

Company Name: Aprende Institute

Company Description: Aprende Institute offers an online education platform designed to provide vocational skills training principally in the US Hispanic market as well as in Latin America. The company's platform offers a wide range of both live and recorded online training courses that assist their students to acquire skills needed to start their own business or advance their vocational skills in areas of high demand, such as hospitality, beauty, and other skilled trades.

HQ Location & Year Founded: Miami, 2013

Founder: Martin Claure, Founder and CEO

Funds Raised and VC Investors: $27 million from 500 Startups, Alumni Ventures, Angel Ventures, ECMC Foundation, Endeavor Catalyst, MatterScale Ventures, Reach Capital, Salkantay Ventures, Univision Communications, Valor Capital Group

Founder’s Background: Martin got his professional start as one of the first hires at wireless company Brightstar after earning a degree in Manufacturing Engineering from Boston University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He then went on to scale and successfully sell his own fintech startup in Peru, as well as develop a publicly traded cleantech ETF (LIT). From there, Martin founded and ran MC Capital, where he oversaw numerous start-up launches, of which over 75% resulted in successful exits. Martin transitioned to a passive role at MC Capital in September 2019 when he joined Aprende Institute as full time CEO.

1.    Where did the idea for Aprende Institute originate?

Aprende started as an online cooking school focused on the market in Mexico. I was an investor in the effort and what we discovered was instead of attracting hobbyists, we were attracting focused, hardworking people who wanted to expand their professional skills and increase their income potential. We expanded to nutrition, healthy eating, and other areas. We then acquired a company doing the same but for skilled trades and beauty. This worked well and it lit up in the US Hispanic market. We thought this could be the beginning of something big. Today we cover gastronomy, wellness, trades, beauty, and other verticals. We rebranded to Aprende, I transitioned from advisor to CEO, we raised outside funds, and started focusing on building an amazing team.

2.    What is the key problem that Aprende intends to solve?

The real problem is around the US Hispanic market. I don’t see a lot of product or amazing companies being built to help this demographic move forward. For many of them, having to use tools in English results in a very poor user experience. We are working to empower the demographic of 60 million Hispanics in the US toward social and economic advancement. Only about 25% of US Hispanics are English-dominant, while 35% are Spanish-dominant and the rest are bilingual. Most US Hispanics prefer to learn in Spanish as they are direct immigrants from Latin America. They moved here to pursue the American dream. The work hard to provide a better life for their families. They are also very entrepreneurial. Most end up in middle or low skill jobs. They don’t speak the language and they face discrimination. That said, they are very entrepreneurial – they have skills for cooking, beauty, and many different trades. We are building a product experience that is designed for them from the ground up. We are focused on teaching soft skills, as well as business and marketing, personalized for each use case.

3.    How are you most differentiated as a service?

What makes Aprende unique is that we’re teaching these things in an innovative manner. There is not a lot of innovation in the skills areas that we teach in. How we do it is also very innovative. We design our curricula, produce our own content with instructional design and learning teams. Experiences designed for our users are both asynchronous where they can go at their own pace, as well as offering live classes that allow people to meet and engage with others. We also offer practical training to put skills into practice. Students always feel like they have someone accompanying them along the way. There is always an expert a text message away. We offer a robust value proposition that leverages people. Students want to feel like someone is on the other end. We are also very affordable at no more than $50 a month for a course.

4.    What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?

Over 100,000 students have gone through Aprende until now. A lot of technology businesses start in Latin America and want to go to the US, but it is unusual for this to actually happen in a big way. We are a US-focused company, but almost 90% of our people are based in Latin America. Our content is made there but is largely sold and consumed here. We have also attracted big partners to help build something incredible such as Reach Capital, Univision, ECMC (impact investors) and many others.

5.    What lies ahead in the product plans for Aprende?

There is a lot of room to improve our curricula. We would love to build new schools for teaching about topics like electric vehicle maintenance. We want to be closer to industry trends to have the most impactful outcomes. Also, offering licensing is very important to many of our students. We teach practical skills but want to be more helpful with securing licensing. We want to be able to provide a one-stop shop. We wish to help secure licenses and ultimately find the best jobs or contractor work for our students.

6.    What are the long-term strategic growth objectives?

We do feel like there’s an opportunity to be the reference for learning in the Spanish language. Today it is very fragmented. We will continue to focus on people who want to keep learning marketable skills other than software coding or what is covered by higher education. Our goal is to be the biggest and most impactful learning brand in Spanish.

Ron’s Take

US immigrant communities are known for their ingenuity, productivity, entrepreneurialism, and yes, willingness to fill critical skills gaps in the American economy. The roughly 20% of Americans who make up the Hispanic population are no exception. It is an unfortunate truth that cutting edge tools and resources have not been available to help this group advance on the economic ladder. It is rare for US-based technology companies to commit early or exclusively to developing product for the vital, yet overlooked, US-based Spanish speaker. Aprende Institute is blazing the trail for others to follow and is taking a hands-on approach to deliver invaluable educational instruction in the practical business and technical skills that are desperately needed for society to meet its needs. With such a severe gap in skilled labor across so many sectors of the economy, the courses that Aprende is offering will play a vital role in bringing both higher incomes and personal fulfillment to its users while uplifting critical industry sectors for the benefit of all.

Disclaimer: Alumni Ventures invested in the Series A-2 round of Aprende Institute in fall 2021.