Brazil

From an early age, Rodrigo Galindo saw firsthand how education could transform lives. His father worked as university dean and his mother as a public school teacher, supervisor and director. They founded a university in Cuiaba, and he started working there when he was 13. Inspired by his parents’ mission to provide quality education, Rodrigo established his own college in one of the poorest states in Brazil at the age of 21, making him the youngest head of a higher educational institution in the country.

By the time he was 30, Rodrigo became CEO at Kroton and expanded the company rapidly, developing an educational model that combined quality and scale — and could reach all of Brazil’s regions and social classes. Rodrigo grew the business dramatically, creating the world’s largest for-profit education firm by market capitalization.

He has increased net revenue from US$89.7m in 2009 to over US$1.5b by 2018. The company now caters a pool of about 2 million students, from preschool through higher education. Currently, one in eight undergraduate students in Brazil is in a Kroton institutions.

Rodrigo says his next major challenge is to “turn Kroton into the leading digital educational company in the world.”