Agility and speed of reaction are two of the characteristics that tend to mark companies that respond well in crises and two of the most marked factors in startups that grow. Hence, along with the acceleration of technology and digitization, several startups have registered a strong boost in their growth in the last year and a half. In some cases, they even knew how to react quickly by rethinking their business model so as not to suffer the ravages of the health and economic crisis.
Others, given the increase in the need for online services, such as education and electronic commerce, registered a greater demand for their services, which helped them raise capital.
Here are some of them.
Learn Institute
More than 400 professionals already work in this educational technological platform founded in Mexico by Martín Claure and based in Miami, keeping in Mexico City its content production and expert house.
Since its inception, it has reached more than one million people. Its main markets are the United States, Mexico and Colombia.
In March of this year, it announced the birth of its new division for companies, with which it seeks to innovate the offer of benefits for employees and clients through access to short lessons focused on well-being and personal development.
That allowed them to reach a different audience and grow 400% in ten months Today, 90% of the Aprende Institute offer is consumed by entrepreneurs or adults who want to start their own business, while the remaining 10% reaches companies of different lines commercial. The marketing plan is to triple that 10% in the next twelve months.
“One sector that benefited was online education. We made a first preCOVID-19 investment in a platform, but the pandemic turned out to be a brutal catalyst. This is the Aprende Institute, which today is the largest vocational education or training platform in Latin America and is very present in the US Hispanic market, ”says Hernán Fernández, managing partner of the Angel Ventures fund.
Since the pandemic arrived and changed the business model, Aprende Institute managed to attract a million free subscribers and 30,000 in paid mode. 60% of its market is in the United States, 30% in Mexico and 10% in the other Latin countries.
WonderBrands
“There is a model that we will invest in recently. It’s called Wonder Brands, it’s a product consolidation model on e-commerce platforms. That company was created at the end of last year. It is very new and has taken a lot of attraction ”, says Fernando Lelo de Larrea, founding partner of ALLVP.
Wonder Brands is a Latin American startup specialized in partnering with digital brands to boost their growth.
The implementation of its strategy is achieved by injecting a variable amount investment into the associated companies to increase working capital, marketing and equipment, as well as providing added value in the areas of technology, digital marketing, supply chain and administration.
At the beginning of March of this year, supported by the ALLVP and Mountain Nazca funds, Wonder Brands announced an investment of 1,000 million pesos to promote e-commerce in Mexico.
It was founded by Federico Malek and Nicolás González. The former was CEO of the first insurtech in Argentina, iunigo.com, and also managing director of Groupon in the Southern Cone. For his part, González is an expert in investment in companies. He is a member of the Investment Committee of NCA, a consortium of family offices based in Switzerland.
Urbvan
It is a Mexican private shared transportation startup, founded in 2016 by Matos Albino and Renato Picard Álvarez, focused on transporting people to their work centers, through a series of established routes. However, as a result of the pandemic, the offices were changed to telecommuting and the company had to rethink its services.
Camilo Kejner, managing partner of Angel Ventures, comments that Urbvan, like other companies with similar models in the region, stopped transporting people to move goods during the first months of confinement.
“They did it very well. They managed to replace 100% of their pre COVID-19 income, which was from the transportation of people, and replaced it with the transportation of products. They modified the configuration of the vehicles they used. It is a vertical in which we saw that several companies did well, says the investor.
Later, the startup reconverted itself to transfer essential personnel for companies that could not close despite the pandemic.
Before the arrival of the coronavirus, Urbvan had 20 companies in its client portfolio and in January 2021 they already offered their services to more than 50. It has a presence in more than 10 cities in the country and works with companies such as Amazon and Bonafont.
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The Mexican startup Descifra, founded by Roberto Wang and Rodrigo Sarmiento, offers companies software- as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, using machine learning and big data, to measure market potential in a given geographic context.
In this way, companies have valuable information to make strategic decisions and predict scenarios for the best location of their businesses.
“Selling to retailers and to people who sell to retailers is complicated, but Descifra benefited from a good reconversion strategy where they expanded their spectrum of work. It was not only a physical retailer, but it also helped identify where your target audience was and online reconversion ”, Kejner comments.
The startup began tracking more than 30 million mobile devices and can tell a business that wants to sell online what searches its target audiences are doing.
“They are doing so well that they did not lose any of the customers from the pre-pandemic physical world,” Kejner adds.
