Alura - a 36-square-metre room with six computers that became Brazil's largest technology school

Paulo Silveira wanted to be a professor. He was a USP computer-science graduate halfway through a master's in algorithms when, in 2004, he and his brother Guilherme opened a school instead, on the block where they lived in Sao Paulo: a room of thirty-six square metres with six cathode-ray computers, called Caelum, Latin for heaven. It taught the historically difficult subjects - Java, agile, open source - to people who already knew how to program, which is a narrower and harder market than teaching beginners, and it did so in person, with five people, for seven years.

The turn came in 2011, when Brazilian broadband was slow enough that the founders worried about the quality of the experience, and they built the online platform anyway; in 2013 it took the name Alura and outside investment, and the classroom school became the smaller part of its own creation. By 2023 the platform had passed half a million students and its Discord community a hundred thousand people. The subject matter was always practice rather than theory - the site's own phrasing is that the school has to knock down its walls and go outside - which is the same instinct as the vendor training centres', applied to open technologies with no vendor to certify them.

Then it bought the university. In 2022, with the private-equity fund Crescera and the Australian group Seek behind it, Alura took a majority stake in FIAP, a Sao Paulo technology university with ten thousand students, in a deal expected to double the combined turnover to 420 million reais; the founder said his old dream of being a professor had, in a sense, come true. The product-management school PM3 and StartSe - the executive-education company with the Silicon Valley missions, which has its own entry - joined the same group, and in 2025 the ecosystem took a name, Grupo Alun, with Silveira as chief vision officer and Adriano Almeida, at the company since 2008, running Alura.

The arc runs the opposite way to Pluralsight's. That company started with instructors in classrooms, became a library, and ended as a lender's collateral. This one started with two would-be professors in a room, became a library, and bought itself a university. What the two have in common is the room: in both cases the whole later structure rests on a handful of people who could explain a hard thing clearly, and the difference between the endings is who kept control of what they built.