Argentine education platform startup Blended attended the Seedstars LATAM summit in Lima, Peru, from December 3 to 6, bringing together all of the winners of Seedstars competitions across the region.
The meeting was designed to help share best practices and create ways in which startups and entrepreneurs can help boost economies and support Latin American countries to reach the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Blended, established in 2015 by Federico Hernandez and Nicolas Andres Gimenez, has created an online platform for schools that provides a single unified place for parents, students and teachers to track student progress.
“Currently, 90% of Latin America’s 700,000 schools use paper and email for their administrative processes, which are expensive and rudimentary tools,” explained Gimenez to LatamList.
With Blended, all communication and administration is streamlined into one platform, which can be accessed either through a mobile app or online with a computer or tablet. Not only can parents and teachers easily communicate, the platform allows the sharing of photos, event postings and more on a secure page.
Parents are also able to follow their child’s progress using Smart Student Reports, which track results, attendance and more. This means that not only can the parents can track how their child is doing at school, but the algorithms of the platform can also make intelligent predictions about the future, warning teachers and parents if an intervention needs to take place to avoid negative impacts on the student’s education.
Although Blended didn’t win the Edtech startup prize – that went to Costa Rican mobile simulation startup Processim Labs – the company has achieved a 90% satisfaction rate and 99% customer retention in the first semester of 2018.
Winning competitions was not the main aim of the Summit, however, which also had workshops to come up with business models and solutions for Edtech, Healthtech and Innovation ecosystems, as well as speakers explaining the importance of taking social and environmental factors into account when building a new business.
“The Summit really demonstrated the importance that innovation plays in our society and why Latam entrepreneurs need to look towards building out solutions horizontally, not just vertically within their fields. This way, they can grow their business whilst tackling larger social and environmental issues,” said Karina Chez, CEO and partner of KAYA Energy Group.
The Seedstars group also created a coworking space in Lima called Seedspace, which provides both a space to work but also for innovative entrepreneurs to come together and collaborate in creating sustainable, social-minded startups for the whole continent.
