UOL EdTech, the largest education technology company, has recently announced the expansion of its operations into Latin America with the internationalization of its vertical B2C company, Passei Direto, Brazil’s biggest academic social network, by launching the brand Studenta, with a R$30 million investment over the next two years.
In pursuit of its goal of increasing access to knowledge and the digital transformation of education, Studenta offers students across Latin America with a collaborative study network with access to materials, abstracts, exercise lists, articles, and all things related to learning, in one place.
Just as students all over Brazil now use Passei Direto, the expansion and internationalization of the social network, through the new brand, takes the collective experience and knowledge exchange to every Spanish-speaking Latin American country.
Commenting on the latest development, Chief Executive Officer of UOL EdTech, Alex Augusto, said:
“The brand’s expansion into Latin America brings added value to users and a more complete experience. Passei Direto is a huge success story in Brazil, it has grown exponentially, helping students to resoundingly achieve their goals, because it is through student exchanges that we are contributing to education. In other words, it is technology itself that is connecting people, and Passei Direto is a great example of that. Our goal is to use our learnings from Brazil and apply them to other markets as part of the international expansion plans for the UOL EdTech ecosystem.”
Augusto further said:
“We want to be the best study network in the world and the internationalization into Latin America is the first step to reaching new markets.”
Through its name, the new Studenta brand places the student at the center of everything, the root “Stud”, which is present in many languages, being an easy term to interpret and recognize. Visually, the logo consists of an evolution of the current Passei Direto mortarboard and the brand’s color palette. Its identity explores the fun, high-spirited and youthful universe of study.
Founded in 2012, Passei Direto provides a proprietary digital platform on which content producers and students create and share materials covering a vast range of knowledge. In Brazil, the company claims to have over 4 million active users, from a total of over 37 million registered users, 14 million content items shared and almost 64 thousand disciplines at all levels of learning, and since 2021 it has formed part of UOL EdTech’s digital education system. The expansion increases its potential impact, allowing approximately 70 million new students to be reached.
Co-founder & Director of Passei Direto, André Simões, added:
“We are taking our first step in expanding into the whole of Latin America in 2022. Passei Direto is an extremely scalable platform and its impact on collaborative learning is huge, given that the more users connected and content shared, the greater the value for all.”
UOL, started in 2017 with the goal of increasing access to knowledge, connecting solutions for students, universities and companies in a comprehensive digital ecosystem. The platform forms part of the UOL Group – the largest content, technology, services and digital payment company in Brazil. The startup believes that the present of education is digital, and it works intensively developing technologies to transform the way students, companies and universities learn and teach.
The initiative to take the platform outside of Brazil is taking place in the midst of a digital acceleration in education, driven by the Coronavirus pandemic, when teaching institutions brought down their traditional geographic boundaries and ran their classes remotely. With this new backdrop, Studenta is here to reaffirm that it is possible to learn online, with a study network that supports remote learning and encourages knowledge sharing.
UOL EdTech has made several investments to increase its portfolio of products and services. In April 2022, the company had acquired Qulture.Rocks, a team performance management platform.
