How Andres Moreno created a way to deliver digital language classes worldwide
Miami tech entrepreneur Andres Moreno has built a market leader in Open English, the platform offering online English classes that now employs nearly 4,000 people worldwide, operates on five continents, and keeps offices in countries as varied as Colombia, Turkey, Brazil, and Singapore.
Now, Moreno is expanding his venture to offer Spanish classes online too, targeting U.S. businesses whose managers want to communicate better with Spanish-speaking staff, customers, and suppliers in the U.S. and beyond. He’s calling the U.S. corporate initiative in English and Spanish Open Education.
The Venezuelan-born founder knows the new push will require a different approach. Fortunately, he is used to pioneering, creating Open English in the 2000s before Zoom and other videochat software was available. Back then, he found students in Latin America’s middle class largely through ads on cable TV. He later attracted learners in the U.S. through social media. Today, his team is building relationships with top brass at multinationals, especially human resource leaders, to obtain contracts to teach company staff.
Moreno sees a strong opportunity to teach Spanish in the U.S. Studies show that nearly one-third of U.S. Latinos rely on Spanish, or if bilingual, prefer Spanish to English as their main language. “More and more, the U.S. is becoming a bilingual country,” Moreno says. “There are many service providers that want to reach Spanish-speaking customers or have suppliers or staff who speak Spanish.”
FROM STARTUP TO MARKET LEADER
Moreno didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. But during his final year in college, while studying engineering in Venezuela, he saw an opportunity to improve the way English was taught. At his small, shared apartment, he gathered 22 programmers to create a platform to offer real-time, online classes anytime, anywhere, with native-speaking teachers. “Back then, if you wanted to speak to someone in another country, you had to make a long-distance call, and it was very expensive,” he says.
Moreno moved to California to raise capital. By 2009, with some $2 million raised, his team set up headquarters in Miami and formally launched Open English. By 2015, Open English had raised more than $100 million. It now boasts more than $150 million in funding from such well-known venture capital firms as TCV, which is active in Netflix and Spotify.
That cash fueled Open English to expand across the Americas and then into Spain and Europe. Later, it bought an English-language company in Turkey and entered the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated growth, partly for corporate clients, as many businesses turned to online schools for their executives working from home. To date, some 10,000 companies worldwide have used the platform for their staff, helping open English boost annual revenues beyond $150 million, Moreno says.
Open English now employs nearly 2,000 online teachers who lead 7 million classes a year. Prices for classes vary, depending on the number of students, length of study, and other factors, but “typically are a fraction of what you pay for traditional, in-person classes,” Moreno says.
While building Open English, Moreno has also contributed to the growth of Miami’s tech ecosystem. He served as a founding board member of accelerator Endeavor, helping to develop its ScaleUp program and mentoring fellow entrepreneurs, says Claudia Duran, managing director of Endeavor Miami. “Andres is a visionary leader,” Duran says, “committed to his multiple businesses and determined to scale them globally.”
