Claudio Sassaki
Claudio Sassaki is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Stanford GSE. He was the Co-Founder and CEO of Geekie, an edtech company in Brazil that pioneered ground-breaking, real time data-based learning systems. Sassaki has worked extensively with students, teachers, schools and districts to design and implement personalized learning strategies. He pioneered the use of technology and AI for personalized learning at massive scale in Brazil - more than ten million students from 5,000 schools have been impacted by the solutions developed by him and his team. Geekie has been the most decorated edtech in Brazil, having won several national and international awards and documented by worldwide recognized media vehicles such as The Economist, The Guardian, BBC and CNN.
A graduate in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade de São Paulo, he also received an MBA and Masters in Education from Stanford University. Sassaki spent almost eight years in investment banking, having reached the position of VP at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. He gave up his career in the financial sector to pursue his dream of transforming lives through education and thus started Geekie.
Sassaki has been recognized by Wired UK as one of the most important social innovators of the world (Wired UK Innovation Fellow), awarded by Schwab Foundation as Social Entrepreneur of the Year, and by EY as Entrepreneur of the Year Brazil. He is an Edmund Hillary Foundation Fellow, Endeavor Entrepreneur, WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education) Award Winner, Trip Transformador, and Folha de São Paulo Social Entrepreneur. His life and journey with Geekie have been portrayed in two documentaries, A New Capitalism (2017) and Going Forward (2017). Sassaki co-wrote a chapter for the book Visible Learning - Theoretical and Practical Experiences in the Classroom (2022).
He currently lives in Palo Alto, CA, with his wife and four children.
- Visit their website
- Geekie
- Model
- Hybrid Social Enterprise
- Sectors
- Education
- Headquarters
- Brazil
- Areas of Impact
- Latin America, Brazil
Geekie
In Brazil, Geekie's goal is to enable every child to have the high-quality education the founders – and every parent in the country – want for their own children. The technology platform has been used by more than 10 million students; in 99% of the cities in Brazil, there is someone that has studied with Geekie.
The company started with three products. Geekie Teste offers learning diagnoses, identifying gaps, and reports that support educators and school administrators in making more informed decisions based on concrete data. Geekie Lab uses data and algorithms to identify the student's gaps and then recommends lessons and activities to better fix them. Geekie Games helps millions of students prepare for the national college entrance exam (ENEM) through an app where students begins their journey by choosing their major, the university they wish to attend and the amount of time they will dedicate to studying. By knowing their goals and the score received in the assessment, the app generates a personalized study plan with access to thousands of video lessons and activities. The solution also uses the IRT model, which allows a fairly accurate estimate of how the candidate will perform on the test.
Geekie is now investing to boost results by looking at an entire learning system, aiming to personalize a full learning curriculum with teacher training, homework and parent dashboards for a very exciting holistic experience. Named Geekie One, this new solution lets each school adopt a comprehensive, flexible, digital curriculum that matches each student's needs and pace, rather than attempting to have everyone keep up with the teacher, as has been done in classrooms for decades.
awardees
Our awardees
Kenny Low
Curt Rhodes
