Excuela: Productivity through learning

There are 2.7 billion frontline workers worldwide (80% of the global workforce), who do not work in traditional office environments but are essential to various industries like manufacturing, retail, construction, hospitality, mining, etc. These "frontline" or "deskless" workers, despite forming the majority of the workforce, receive a small fraction ($18 billion) of the $240 billion annual corporate training expenditure, which in itself already reveals a great asymmetry that becomes even more serious when we realize that the people at the base of the organizational and social pyramid are those who need the most educational reinforcement and who are subject to the type of work with the highest risk in the entire social pyramid.

Specifically in Latin America (LatAm), its low productivity, hindered by inadequate education and skill gaps, generates wider gaps with advanced nations. Skill gaps, linked to and reinforcing informality, are both a cause and consequence of the high informal labor sector (e.g., 76.8% in Peru). To break the cycle of low productivity and informality, upskilling and reskilling are crucial, especially for frontline workers with limited education.

A global labor deficit of $8.5 trillion is anticipated by 2030, driven by unequal access to learning and training opportunities for the majority of the workforce that does not work in office settings. Specifically in LatAm, low productivity due to educational and skill gaps widens the divide with more developed nations. These skill gaps, which foster a high rate of informal labor, demand urgent upskilling and reskilling, especially for frontline workers with limited educational backgrounds.

Although 76% of companies invest in training, the focus tends to be on management and technical skills rather than on frontline workers, exacerbating a global talent shortage. In LatAm, 70% of companies face challenges in finding skilled talent. The World Economic Forum (WEF) notes a rapidly changing skills landscape, with an expected 44% turnover in essential skills within the next five years. Current education technology (EdTech) solutions, like MOOCs or Zoom-based training, are often ineffective for this demographic. Addressing these challenges through efficient, scalable, and low-cost mobile education systems is crucial for breaking the cycle of low productivity and high informality, particularly in LatAm, and leveraging the untapped potential of the frontline workforce globally.

Excuela is a mobile education system for frontline personnel in organizations, as well as individuals at the bottom of the social pyramid (vulnerable populations). We design learning courses taking into account the relevant context of our target audience and their existing knowledge, as well as the reality in which they live (limited stable connectivity and non-sophisticated mobile phones). Our solution prioritizes continuous interaction with the content through questions and constructs learning objectives with micro or bite-sized content that can easily be followed on mid-range to low-end smartphones. As of now, 85.8% of the population in Latin America owns mobile phones, with similar levels of mobile connectivity penetration in other emerging regions of the world.

Excuela's approach caters to emerging regions globally. Our platform (and learning dynamic) has been conceived based on a deep understanding of how vulnerable/rural populations learn most effectively. It's designed to be used on the tool they already have with them: a mid-range or low-end smartphone. That's why we've developed technology that requires minimal memory, consumes very little data, and can even be used without internet access. Learning for someone without study habits must be focused on a specific learning purpose, continuous interaction, relatable context, and a social dynamic (cohort-based) that makes them feel part of a development group.

One of the key elements of Excuela is the use of data and participant management. Data is used to generate learning statistical reports for both the participant and the organization she is part of. Our solution also incorporates a mass communication tool within the app for tutors and facilitators, a forum to share doubts among learning groups, and a set of automatic notifications to motivate and monitor learning. This way, it creates responsibility in learning and develops the habit of lifelong learning.

In terms of pedagogy, Excuela emphasizes specific learning goals, continuous interaction, relatable context, and cohort-based social dynamics (Duolingo for Productivity). Notably, it incorporates data for learning reports, a mass communication tool, forums, and automatic notifications, fostering lifelong learning habits. Regarding technology, our solution is mobile-first, low-tech (without unnecessary complex features), and low-bandwidth (it weighs less than a high-resolution photo; even the app version can be used without internet access). We've followed a reverse engineering process, developing from the tool that an individual at the base of the organizational or social pyramid has: a not-so-sophisticated smartphone.

Our solution has been developed entirely in-house, with a team composed of 100% internal members.

Excuela incorporates various technologies to enhance its value proposition. For instance, we utilize machine learning to reinforce concepts and enhance course content based on participants' usage and engagement. Additionally, Excuela uses Artificial Intelligence, to assist in generating or complementing educational content using the materials provided by companies and organizations. In terms of information security, Excuela is built on Firebase (Back-end), Angular (Front-end), Flutter (Apps - Android & iOS)  and our data-based is stored in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to safeguard user and client information according to industry-leading standards.

The target beneficiary audience is the underprivileged population in emerging countries, possessing lower skills and occupying (or potentially occupying) positions in the bottom of the corporate pyramid in companies, organizations, and societies in general. The distribution focus on large formal companies and organizations enables reaching not only their frontline workers but also, through them, their stakeholders and communities of influence who lack formal employment. Although it's challenging to characterize these workers, given they number in the millions within the Economically Active Population across diverse industries, some approximations can be made using household survey data.

As a reference and using data from Peru, according to the National Household Survey (ENAHO), the Economically Active Population (EAP) in Peru consists of around 17.7 million people. Out of this total, 42.7% have completed only secondary education, while 16.5% have some form of non-university higher education. Individuals with the most basic education not only experience high turnover between industries but also between formality and informality. In terms of connectivity and Tech IQ, 85.8% have mobile connectivity (compared to 39.4% with fixed internet).

The existing tools in the EdTech market for upskilling and reskilling are not designed for this segment of vulnerable populations. The most commonly used modality is called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), platforms such as EdX, Coursera, etc. They consist of pre-recorded videos with unclear learning objectives, generic content, little to no interaction, no guidance, and most importantly, no sense of community or belonging to a cohort. Additionally, they require a stable internet connection and consume a significant amount of data. All of these factors contribute to dropout rates exceeding 90%. This modality assumes that individuals possess a certain level of skills, as well as study habits and discipline that allow them to engage in self-directed learning focused solely on content delivery.

On the other hand, there are synchronous training courses (conducted through platforms like Zoom), which offer more effective and interactive dynamics with specific content and a sense of community. However, they face challenges in terms of scalability. Moreover, these modalities presuppose access to a computer and fixed internet.

Excuela's learning approach is built upon three pedagogical pillars to impact users without established learning habits or discipline: Active-Learning (learning based on interaction with various question types), scenario-based (content is not generic but contextualized by industry or user reality), and Cohort-based (leveraging the social contexts in which our users live to generate greater engagement).

Excuela has a positive impact on the following profiles in emerging countries:

Current frontline workers in companies.

Female frontline workers.

Communities and interest groups within large companies (artisanal fishermen, recyclers, rural mining communities, etc.).

Future workers (upskilling and reskilling, and connecting to job opportunities).

Our main impact goal for these segments is to generate better job opportunities for them and, therefore, contribute to social mobility.

Excuela and its team arise from a deep understanding of the significant problem we seek to solve. On one hand, Gonzalo (Co-founder & COO) was a business consultant for large extractive companies in Labor (Mining, Agriculture, Fishing, etc.) and witnessed firsthand the major flaws surrounding the training (so ineffective) of frontline workers that not only caused a decrease in productivity but also led to regrettable deaths. On the other hand, Jose Luis (Co-founder & CEO) was the Head of Venture for a rural connectivity project (infrastructure, education, and health) for communities in LatAm. Jose Aponte (Co-founder & CTO) came from having over 10 years of experience in full stack software development and, during the last 3 years, was completely focused on developing FinTech & EdTech solutions for people at the base of the organizational pyramid.

Regarding the experience and areas of expertise of the leadership team and the rest of the team.

Gonzalo (COO) was partner and initial investor @uDocz (2018), an EdTech company with over 3 million users in the region and having raised over USD 2 million in raised capital, where he also played an active commercial role. A fellow at Latitud (LF10) and named Young Leader of the Americas 2024. Over 6 years of experience as a consultant, with more than 3 years leading teams in the financial services industry (corporate banking, investment funds).

Jose Luis (CEO) is the founder of Grupo Norte (an important real estate business in Peru) and has over 20 years of entrepreneurial experience in various industries (real estate, tourism, technology, etc.). He also served as the Head of Venture for a rural connectivity project at Intercorp.

Jose Aponte (CTO) has been a full-stack developer for over 10 years, working on products for companies in FinTech, EdTech, and E-commerce.

Additionally, we have assembled a multidisciplinary team of over 32 individuals (56% women) passionate about this challenge, including software engineers, educators, sociologists, anthropologists, and storytelling experts. This diverse team have allowed us to create the most suitable platform for our target audience.

To date, we have been able to positively impact more than 15,000 users in Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Brazil, with whom we have recorded an average course completion ratio of over 85% and overall platform satisfaction above 94%. The impact on KPIs is directly associated with the type of course we develop with our client companies, but I detail some examples of the impact we have evidenced with some of our projects: A 13% reduction in the dropout rate of first-cycle university students, a 22% reduction in incident rates of accidents among mining operators, among others.

On the investment side, Excuela has just closed a pre-seed round of USD 700,000 led by the IDB Lab and plans to open a Seed round in the first quarter of 2025.

For all of these reasons, Excuela has been included as a company in the IDBLab portfolio, we have won the first place in the IEEE’s Connecting the Unconnected Challenge (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), have won the LatAm-Spain Scale Up Program (IDB, Endeavor, Spanish Ministry of Foreign Trade) and got first place in TecPrize 2024 (Tecnológico de Monterrey).

We have validated in the past how valuable it is to be part of a community of bright individuals and valuable mentors to increase the chances of impact and success for our company. We greatly admire the reputation, trajectory, and expertise of MIT as an institution, and being recognized by you as a company that could be generating significant impact for the world would allow us to create greater connections of value and explore opportunities with different actors.

Like any company, we have many business challenges that we are confident within the valuable MIT-Solve community we could reach out to the right people to overcome them.

Finally, we feel that we could add a lot to this community. We bring very valuable and scarce knowledge about how Latin America operates, particularly in the segment of the organizational and/or social base of the pyramid. We know that by sharing this valuable takeaways, we could contribute to more and better solutions also considering generating a positive impact in our region.

Over the past few years, we have been fully committed to researching the most effective ways in which frontline operational workers (blue-collar & gray-collar) learn. This has allowed us to identify some insights that our competitors in the region have not yet internalized.

Frontline workers don't learn for the sake of it; it's important to tie their learning efforts to the two main learning objectives they have within an organization: the possibility of advancement or the possibility of visibility (being seen by their manager, their manager's manager, or the HR department).

The reason why MOOCs are not effective is because they assume that the participant already has a developed learning habit and discipline, especially in Latin America. The idea that recording a professor at Stanford and having someone with limited resources in Bolivia effectively absorb the knowledge has been invalidated.

For the bottom of the pyramid worker, context is as important as content. Learning is like a chain of links; for it to be truly effective, it must be annexed to some specific context that is already familiar to the participant.

Effective learning for blue/gray-collar workers is that which occurs within a cohort-based dynamic and, at the same time, also provides effective support, leveraging data, from a supervisor.

It is for all these reasons that our learning dynamics within the platform are based on Active Learning (based on interaction with various types of questions), Scenario-based (content is not generic but contextualized by industry or user reality), and Cohort-based (leveraging the social contexts in which our users live to generate greater engagement). At a technological level, we have avoided forcing unnecessarily complex functionalities for this profile, making our solution low-bandwidth and perfectly functional on less sophisticated smartphones.

The problem of lack of skills in frontline workers has various direct and indirect collateral consequences.

Low productivity in Latin America is one of the most relevant factors explaining why the development gap between emerging countries and advanced countries has not been reduced. Productivity growth over the last three decades has been limited and even negative between 2014 and 2019. The region's low productivity is due, among other factors, to the low quality of public education, as well as significant gaps in access to job training adequately integrated into the labor market. The labor skills gap is both a cause and a consequence of high informality rates and mutually reinforces each other. These workers move from informality to formality, often rotating jobs frequently and unable to stay in formal employment for long periods. Low levels of productivity, strongly associated with skills that do not match the needs of the labor market, mean that workers are not productive enough to overcome the current costs of formalization. To reduce the skills gap, 76% of companies primarily choose to train their staff. However, the training offered is mostly oriented towards managerial staff and full-time workers. Additionally, training usually focuses on technical skills, despite the greatest gaps being in socio-emotional skills (ENHAT 2017-2018). The lack of upskilling and reskilling of the population and the shortage of talent are global problems that are increasingly worsening. According to Manpower, in 2023, 77% of employers worldwide report difficulties in finding the human talent they need, more than double that of 2013. Likewise, the WEF has identified competencies it considers key for the development and social mobilization of frontline workers that could enable them to adapt to changing job demands and improve their employability. Some of these competencies include basic technical, digital, interpersonal and collaboration skills, continuous learning, and problem-solving skills.

It is for all these reasons that at Excuela, we monitor the following metrics, segmented into different dimensions, to ensure that we are contributing to transforming the reality of the region:

1. Impact for the participant (frontline worker): Job retention, Formality penetration, Promotions and improvements in income - social mobility.

2. Impact for companies and client organizations: Increase in productivity (or the strategically desired indicator), Decrease in labor risks and occupations in the operation.

3. Impact on individuals or communities of influence: Increase in learning (e.g., personal finance, marine conservation, etc.).

On the measurement side, at Excuela, we have three main sets of data: Interaction, Usage, and Impact.

Regarding interaction metrics, these encompass all the key indicators related to user learning and engagement with the educational dynamics in Excuela to track informed decisions based on our users' behavior. Within this group, we find: Activity ratio (how many users are active in their learning), Time spent on learning (minutes per day, per week), Progress of courses enabled for users, and Learning outcomes (points obtained / total potential points).

On the other hand, we have usage metrics. This chapter of metrics allows us to consolidate certain user behavior patterns and identify opportunities for improvement for the platform or courses developed for users. The main metrics to monitor in this chapter are: Course satisfaction (percentage), NPS (of the learning experience at Excuela), and the time and hour at which our users connect (to define the most opportune moments to trigger reminders).

Finally, we have impact metrics. This group of metrics is the most important for our solution, as they indicate a change in behavior resulting from user interaction with our solution. With these metrics, we aim to tie the courses we develop to a KPI of our client companies to determine if Excuela was able to move the desired KPI through a covariance matrix. Beyond these business-associated impact metrics, we have user development impact metrics that, as we indicated in a previous question, are related to quality education and decent work KPIs such as: Job retention, Formality penetration, Promotions and improvements in income - social mobility.

At Excuela, we have applied various technologies to strengthen our value proposition.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning: We work with machine learning to segment users and define the best reinforcement messages and notifications based on their usage and interaction, defining different actions per segment to ensure they return to the platform. This enable us to use Artificial Intelligence for course content development. One of the main premises on which we built Excuela is that "content not only exists but abounds." What we do at Excuela is take content developed by our clients/partners organizations (in manuals, presentations, guides, etc.) and through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process, our technology can read the content and, with AI, develop courses and questions based on that content. This ensures that the content is not generic and is always tied to the context known by the users. We have also integrated our system so that users can directly address questions (both support-related and about course content) with AI.

Blockchain: Regarding certifications, when a user completes a course at Excuela, an automatic certificate is issued in the name of Excuela and the organization we work with (our client). These certificates are stored in Blockchain, particularly on the IDB Blockchain network (Lacchain), to ensure they are unalterable and verifiable.

WhatsApp: We are integrated with WhatsApp to reinforce our learning dynamics and courses by sending recurring messages to users. This allows us not only to send notifications but also to send learning nuggets with questions to users via WhatsApp and generate more learning data about them.

Our App (Android & iOS) is developed in Flutter, and our web responsive and BO are in Angular. We use Google Cloud Platform as our cloud server.

36 full time employees.

The team is predominantly composed of software engineers (18), with the remainder consisting of individuals focused on validating pedagogical effectiveness (educators, writers, storytellers), and individuals with commercial roles.

We launched the platform in November 2022, but we have been working together since June 2022.

Diversity is a fundamental pillar at Excuela and is the reason why we have been able to attract such talented individuals from different backgrounds. At the organizational level, we are a company with a majority of women (58%). Within our leadership team, we have individuals of African descent and part of the LGBT community.

We have payroll management policies that do not allow us to have more than a 60% gender predominance in the company. Similarly, we have various rituals and cultural initiatives that allow us, as a team with such diverse backgrounds (from academic disciplines to countries of residence), to still have spaces to share customs and words among team members.

At Excuela, we are aiming to solve a global problem that affects 2.7 billion people; the only way to do so is by attracting the best talent (capable and diverse) with whom we can develop a powerful solution that positively impacts everyone.

Excuela's value proposition can be summarized in one phrase: "For companies, productivity; for workers, opportunity (for professional growth)."

Our business model is B2B (training our client’s workers), targeting primarily medium and large companies with high labor intensity, and B2B2C, where we work with companies but seek to impact other stakeholders (customers, communities they interact with, suppliers, employee’s families, etc.).

Excuela has two revenue streams:

1. Course creation fee: This is a process where we leverage the technological development we have done with AI to generate a course based on the content the company possesses. Under this dynamic, we charge a one-time fee of USD 2,000 per course.

2. Subscription fee: We have different price ranges depending on the number of users a company wants to register, but in all our ranges, we offer Excuela for cents per user per month. To achieve the massive scale we aim for, we needed a monetization model that makes it viable for our clients (while being very profitable for the company).

We have developed a scalable solution that allows us to effectively impact millions of people, and we've also designed a highly sustainable business model. On the funding side, we've secured funding from private investors that enabled us to technologically develop the solution (Android, iOS, web/responsive) and implement projects with various companies in the Americas. Additionally, we've received funding from IDB Lab due to being an impactful company with potential across continents.

We are a cost-efficient team completely focused on execution and value generation, which is why we have been profitable in the last 4 months of operation. With that said, we plan to hire an additional 15 people to the team (bringing us to +50 people) to continue growing at the pace we've been advancing. In 1Q2025, we plan to open a Seed Round of USD 3M to scale our solution and model to new markets.

Similarly, we have been participating (and fortunately winning) in some competitions and challenges such as the TecPrize 2024 (first place winners - USD 30,000), Connecting the Unconnected Challenge (first place winners - USD 7,000), among some others that have allowed us to generate additional income no less for the company. We are in the process of accessing some grants to deploy significant private projects by industry.