Giganci Programowania is the largest private school in Poland that teaches programming to children and teenagers. This year, the company wants to try to operate globally by raising EUR 3.5M from investors.
The company was founded in 2015 by four IT specialists from the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology of the Warsaw University of Technology, and seven years later, they closed the year with revenues of EUR 4M, becoming the most significant representative of this business in Poland, without the support of foreign capital. They have 129 facilities where over 600 trainers teach children stationary or online how to create games and other applications and code in various programming languages. Although they have trained over 100,000 students and now have 13,000 active customers from Poland who bring 90% of revenues, they dream of going global. At the beginning of this year, they obtained EUR 3.5M in funding from the Polish Nunatak Capital fund and the Hungarian PortfoLion, which they want to use for foreign expansion – first in Spanish-speaking countries and possibly Latin America, then in the UK and Germany.
Initially, they acquired customers thanks to leaflets left at school, and then they began to use internet marketing tools. They also carried out unique campaigns: publishing coding textbooks for the youngest or free workshops for children, “Code with Gigantami,” in which 30,000 students participated in the last edition. A vast increase also helped them in demand for programmers, and during the pandemic, they did not suffer too much because they quickly switched to remote work. As a result, online courses are currently responsible for approx. 70% of the company’s revenues and almost all foreign sales because, with the help of franchisees, they already operate in 14 markets.
They opened their outlets in Spain and Chile. In a franchise model, they operate under the Coding Giants brand, among others in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovakia, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, and Singapore. They offer each franchisee their own CRM and LMS systems, thanks to which they maintain consistency of standards and processes. They also help franchisees hire coding trainers, recruit, distribute teaching materials, and conduct classes.
According to Nunatak Capital, the education of the future belongs to a hybrid model in which AI supports teachers in choosing teaching methods tailored to the needs and capabilities of individual students. The Software Giants are in a great starting position to follow this path and transform into a global business, and the sponsor can help them with this thanks to a good knowledge of data science tools and solutions.