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Pipo Saude, a startup that developed a platform that sells and manages healthcare benefits for Brazilian companies, has raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding.

Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital led the round, marking the first time the New York-based venture firm has led an investment in a Brazilian startup. (Although, notably, Thrive has also put money in Nubank and Loft.)

Atlantico participated in the financing as a new investor in addition to all existing backers including Monashees, Kaszek and OneVC. Nubank co-founder and CEO David Velez and Cedar co-founder and CEO Florian Otto (and former CEO of Groupon in Brazil) also joined in the round. Pipo Saude had raised $4.6 million in a seed round in June 2020 that was led by Monashees and Kaszek with the participation of OneVC and Nubank’s Velez.

Pipo Saude raises $4.6 million to bring healthcare benefits management services to Brazil

Manoela Mitchell (CEO), Thiago Torres (COO) and Vinicius Correa (CTO) founded Pipo Saude in July 2019 with the goal of “bringing an unparalleled experience” of buying and managing healthcare benefits for corporations in combination with providing a care navigation platform for employees. More simply, its mission is to “transform” the healthcare experience for companies and their employees.

Pipo Saude started selling its solution six months after its inception. Over the past year, it has grown its ARR by “around 5x,” and the number of lives managed by 7.2x, according to Mitchell. Pipo currently has 100 corporate clients and 15,000 lives under management. Its clients include Brazilian unicorns MadeiraMadeira and Buser, Caelum and Funcional Health Tech, among others. Pipo Saude makes money off of commissions and says that its business model is a hybrid of Nava, Accolade and Rightway, but that Zenefits and Amino are inspirations or benchmarks that it “looks up to.”

When Pipo was first founded in 2019, the company was trying to convince prospective customers that digital healthcare could be an interesting option to reduce cost and improve care, according to Mitchell.

And then when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, she added, the whole sector was forced to change and the company saw all stakeholders from doctors to employers to patients “adopting technologies to make their job easier or more accessible to others.”

This trend also helped Pipo grow. In January 2020, it had two corporate clients. By December of the same year, it had around 70.

“COVID has fast-forwarded the digital transformation of the healthcare system everywhere, but even more so in a place like Brazil that was a few years behind the U.S. when it came to technology penetration in the health space,” Mitchell said.

Image Credits: Pipo Saude

Because healthcare is so complex, most companies outsource the benefits capabilities to traditional brokers. Pipo, she said, was created to “disrupt this landscape” with the use of technology and data.

The company claims that enrolling a new member in a healthcare plan can typically take up to 10 business days in Brazil, but that Pipo “can do it in less than 1 hour” given its integrations with HMO/PPOs. It plans to use the new funds to continue investing heavily in technology and data with the goal of launching its first digital product that will be “100% focused” on its members.

Sao Paulo-based Pipo currently has 108 employees distributed across 33 cities and three countries, up from 27 a year ago. During the pandemic, it evolved into being a “remote-first-company.”

The startup also plans to use its new capital to do some hiring, with the goal of doubling the number of its full-time employees by year’s end. Mitchell described the business model as an “asset-light” one that connects healthcare buyers, users and products without having any type of regulatory capital need.

In the medium to long term, Mitchell said the team views Pipo as a local business rather than a global one.

“Going deep into healthcare data and protocols requires a lot of specialization and deep understanding,” she said. Also, the opportunity in Brazil is just so large.

“We are focused on being the local leader in Brazil rather than having a broader but shallower expertise across many markets,” Mitchell said.

Kareem Zaki, a general partner at Thrive, said his firm invested in Pipo Saude because it viewed the company as the first of its kind innovating the channel by which healthcare solutions reach individuals and their families.

“Pipo is using data to deliver value at every step of the customer journey, from informing employers’ purchase decisions and automating manual pieces of benefit management to helping employees navigate the healthcare system to meet their individual needs,” he wrote in an email. “The result is 20% better savings, up to 50 times faster workflows, and a 97% customer satisfaction rate that is unprecedented in the industry.”

Pipo Saude is not the only Brazilian startup tackling the benefits space. Earlier this month, Flash, a startup that has developed a flexible benefits platform for Brazilian companies and employees, announced it had raised $22 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global Management.

Latin America’s digital transformation is making up for lost time

In Bangladesh, students often rely on after school learning centers for study help or test preparation, but many of the best ones are concentrated in major cities. Edtech startup Shikho was created to make supplementary education more accessible and affordable. The company announced today it has closed a $1.3 million seed round co-led by returning investor LearnStart (the seed fund of edtech investment firm Learn Capital) and Anchorless Bangladesh. 

The round also included participation from Wavemaker Partners and Ankur Nagpal, founder and chief executive officer of online course platform Teachable. Shikho’s last round of funding was $275,000 in pre-seed financing last year from LearnStart and strategic angel investors. 

Founded in April 2019, Shikho is focused on grades 9, 10, 11 and 12, with plans to introduce content for grades 6 up to university level and continuous education. Its learning material, created by educators and subject experts, is based on the Bangladeshi National Curriculum. To keep students engaged, it uses gamification techniques, like points, leaderboards and virtual awards. 

Shikho was founded in April 2019 by CEO Shahir Chowdhury, who previously worked in finance and business, including as a director at HSBC UK’s Private Bank, and chief operating officer Zeeshan Zakaria, who also worked in finance before becoming a mathematics teacher. 

Both grew up in Dhaka before moving to the United Kingdom, where they went to university. Chowdhury told TechCrunch that even while working in finance, his goal was to launch a socially impactful business in Bangladesh. 

Indonesian edtech startup Gredu raises $4M Series A to keep teachers, parents and students engaged with one another

At first, Chowdhury looked at fintech because of his career experience, but realized there were already many players focused on financial inclusion in Bangladesh, like bKash. He started thinking about education–Chowdhury’s father is a retired professor and his mother still teaches high school. Then by coincidence, he worked on a client report about the emergence of Indian and Chinese edtech startups, like Byju’s and Toppr. 

“I tried to understand what edtech was and why it was working in those markets and why it didn’t exist in Bangladesh,” said Chowdhury. “When I looked at that closely, there was no reason for it not to exist in Bangladesh. From an macroeconomic perspective, you have all the elements you need. You have a very large population, about 165 million people, and half of that is under the age of 25.”

Chowdhury reached out to Zakaria to lead Shikho’s academic programming. Shikho’s goal is to find more engaging and effective ways to teach students material from the Bangladesh National Curriculum. 

“Not much has changed since my dad was in grade 10 in terms of the syllabus,” said Zakaria. “I’m not a politician, so I can’t bring about change there, but I can change how it’s delivered. We deliver the curriculum in a way that has never been seen before in terms of the pedagogical experience.” 

Indian edtech giant Byju’s to expand to international markets

Shikho launched about a year before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but that didn’t change its approach to product development because it was always meant to be an online learning platform. 

The company works with educators to create content, including animated videos that break down topics into short segments of about six minutes each to help students learn at their own pace. Each video is supplemented with digital resources called smart notes to replace the guidebooks many students buy for studying, and practice questions with detailed solutions.

Shikho’s main video content is pre-recorded, but it will also launch live classes for its app and web portal in about six weeks. The company’s new funding will allow it to scale-up content production, including an app for parents. 

One of the biggest challenges for online learning platforms is keeping students motivated. Chowdhury said Shikho’s gamification system was inspired by the Nike Run Club app. Similar to how Nike Run Club users get points every time they go on a run, Shikho gives students points when they log in, do a test or watch a video. The points can be collected for milestones ranging from beginner to “legend,” and special badges are awarded for accomplishments like finishing a test quickly and accurately. 

The point system also feeds into a leaderboard, so students can see how many points they have compared to other Shikho users at their school, or on the entire app. 

The app is free to use for seven days. One of the company’s plans for its new funding is to launch more freemium content to increase user conversions into paying customers. Chowdhury says that paying users have high engagement rates, typically spending about 45 to 50 minutes daily in the app. Shikho plans to double-down on its user acquisition strategy, including offline sales teams in front of schools, at the end of the year after launching its app for parents. 

“Students are the users and the actual customers are their parents, so we’re conscious that we’re going to have to flip communication to the parents,” said Chowdhury. “That’s part of what this funding round is for.” 

In statement about investment, Anchorless Bangladesh founding partner and CEO Rahat Ahmed said, “Bangladesh has one of the largest allocations of private education expenditure as a percentage of disposable income in the world, but lags behind countries like India and Indonesia when it comes to edtech funding. The market is primed for growth and we believe the team at Shikho is well-fit to lead the charge and take education to the next level.” 

The 2021 edtech avalanche has just begun