The African Leadership Group has an agreement to acquire Holberton. The seven-year-old company with physical schools across the globe will split in two. The existing 34 Holberton locations will be spun out to become a stand-alone business under current Holberton COO.
The company's early focus on in-person education put a lot of pressure on it as a result of the swine flu. Holberton pivoted to mostly focus on software as a service and began offering a white-labeled online learning platform to others after those locations closed. Barbier said that a number of potential acquirers approached him last year, but he didn't think they were a great fit with the company's current financial situation. Barbier, who will join ALG with most of the Holberton tech team, said that he was happy about the numbers, even though neither party disclosed the acquisition price.
Barbier said that ALG began as a Holberton customer. He said there were a lot of similarities between the two companies. At one point, the talk about an acquisition came to mind. You start to think if there is a chance for a merger after hitting those big numbers. Is it a good idea to combine the companies? It made a lot of sense and that is how we started talking about it.
Big numbers is what ALX is all about. The African Leadership Academy was founded as a leadership academy by Fred Swaniker. The African Leadership University has a focus on leadership and entrepreneurship. The group wants to teach tech skills to millions of tech workers.
The group is called the African Leadership Group.
The world is going through a digital transformation and there will be a need for skills like software engineering, data science, cloud computing, and cybersecurity. The school is not a high school. It is not a university, but it is for people with college degrees who want to work in the fourth industrial revolution.
He said that the goal is to train 200,000 students annually. The number of students worked with by ALX has increased from 2000 to 150,000. He said that young people in Africa have realized that their future is in technology. There is a massive shortage of technology talent and traditional sources of finding this talent like China, India and the U.S. are all aging, so we see a tremendous opportunity to solve this global shortage of technology talent by training millions of software engineers in Africa.
The group is called the African Leadership Group.
The business plan comes in. The traditional coding school model of training students for free and then getting a share of the graduate's income after they graduate was going to be difficult. ALG is taking two different approaches. The Room, ALG's talent agency, and its B2B businesses will provide businesses with access to technology talent, as well as using Holberton's existing curriculum to train them. Swaniker wants to build a technology services business that can offer technology solutions to other businesses. The education side of ALG/ALX would benefit from the revenue created by those businesses.
The challenge for ALX is to build its brand and execute on its vision. He said that they have the technology and it is now about execution. Is it possible to build our brand with corporate clients? Is it possible for us to acquire them? Is it possible to deliver the talent that they want? Can we continue to grow with excellence even as we scale? There is a risk in the current climate that may push companies to become more secretive as governments do the same.
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