Innovation is present in all Vintage Altaroc companies. From biodiversity conservation to telecoms, some companies are also disrupting the world of coding, online gaming and education.
Examples include Bubble, which lets you create applications without knowing how to code; Chess.com, which has rapidly established itself as the world's leading site for online chess players. And from Mexico, Crehana has developed a leading digital platform offering over 700 courses and 100,000 techniques and skills. The company now radiates throughout Latin America.
Bubble lets you create web applications without coding
Since its creation in 2012, Bubble has established itself as a global champion of no-code. Co-founded by Frenchman Emmanuel Straschnov, its Bubble.io platform requires no knowledge of web programming. The company caters for multinationals, startups and SMEs, operating in both information and communication technologies and high-tech industries.
Today, Bubble boasts over 13,000 businesses and 2.1 million users worldwide. It is also committed to diversity, thanks to its "Immerse" program, designed to support African-American and Latino male and female entrepreneurs in the United States in the creation of their websites and mobile applications over a 10-week period. The United States is a key market for Bubble, which generates 1/3 of its sales there.
Chess.com, the essential site for online chess players
With over 140 million members worldwide, Chess.com is the reference site for online chess games. It was recently named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential companies in the world.
The company was founded in 2005 by two university friends: Erik Allebest and Jay Severson. In the words of E. Allebest, "I've been playing video games all my life. For me, seeing chess become the leading online game is a dream come true.
Chess.com is growing fast, adding 150,000 new players every day and ranking 114th among the world's most visited websites.
In fact, the site experienced a veritable craze following the Covid-19 pandemic and the resounding success of the series "The Lady's Game", broadcast on Netflix.
"We knew a chess series was coming, but we didn't realize it would become one of the most popular series in Netflix history. We clearly weren't prepared for it," explains Nick Barton, the company's Director of Financial Development, who offers online games and tournaments, as well as courses to improve one's chess skills.
Crehana: making education accessible to all
We're heading for Mexico, where Crehana has become a world leader in educational technology. Its mission is to bridge the training gap in Latin America and universalize professional development paths.
Founded in 2015 by Diego Olcese and Rodolfo Dañino, Crehana is disrupting the workforce development sector in Latin America by offering companies a single point of contact with access to a range of tools that help them throughout their employees' learning and development journey. Crehana works with over 400 experts to offer more than 700 courses teaching over 100,000 techniques and skills in the fields of 3D animation, digital architecture, video, photography and design.
Crehana offers courses and training for individuals, but it has truly created a revolution by offering them to businesses too, with its "Crehana for Business" offering, which operates on a cloud-based SaaS model. The platform is built around learning modules that can be bundled and priced according to customers' needs, creating a channel for loyalty and recurring subscriptions, and therefore revenue for Crehana.
The company enables better training of employees in Latin America, and thus strengthens the skills and competitiveness of Latin American companies on a global scale. In this way, it contributes to the economic development of the countries in which its platform is available, namely Mexico, Peru and Brazil.
By raising $70 million in a financing round led by General Atlantic, Crehana has broken all records for fund-raising for an Edtech in Latin America.
"Our mission is to make career development universal and enable Latin American companies to build their teams effectively in the fast-paced world we live in," explains Diego Olcese, founder and CEO of Crehana. "Over the past 18 months, we've experienced record growth, and we believe the market will only accelerate. Today, over 50% of our revenues come from Crehana for Business. Our goal is to provide talent managers with automated machine learning and AI-driven tools that can enable effective understanding of their teams' gaps and provide the value-added support needed to address them."
