Khan Academy scales integrations beyond the U.S. to reach 1.75M students in Brazil

About the Brazilian Edtech Market

Brazil’s edtech market operates very differently from that of the United States and Canada. Here, states—not individual schools—are responsible for purchasing and implementing digital tools. This centralized approach shapes how Brazilian education leaders ensure edtech reaches the country’s 47 million students and 2.1 million teachers across 179,000 schools (Reach Capital, 2023).

Edtech is thriving in Brazil, especially since 98% of schools have internet access and use mobile-first tools. Almost every student and teacher relies on WhatsApp (99%) and YouTube (97%) for learning and engagement (Reach Capital, 2023).

To navigate this market, global edtech leaders like Khan Academy have turned to local partnerships—teaming up with Clever and Layers to deliver scalable rollouts.

The Challenge: Scaling Implementation Across Brazilian Schools

When Khan Academy started to focus on growing in São Paulo, they faced a familiar challenge for any app entering the market: scaling implementation.

Khan Academy needed to quickly roll out its platform across the entire state – without having teachers manually roster accounts. However, building new integrations with Brazilian SISes requires custom work and pulls resources away from providing every student a world-class education. Their priority was to ensure accounts were easily created – without manual account creation – and for students and teachers to access Khan Academy through the systems they already used. Just as importantly, they needed to ensure every license was ready to go on the first day students came back to school.

The Solution: One integration, extended to every school in Brazil

With one connection, Khan Academy was able to offer automated rostering and SSO in Brazil —no new development, no extra lift.

The Technical Setup

Clever’s integration with Layers enables any edtech partner to scale across Brazil’s state systems—no new SIS or API development required.

Schools in Brazil use Layers, the leading Brazilian SSO platform for edtech, because it integrates with local SISes and automatically rosters accounts for every student and teacher. This allowed Khan Academy to use their existing Clever integration to keep accounts updated automatically, just as they do with U.S. districts.

Easy Setup, Instant Student Access

The set up process alleviated the pain of teachers creating their Khan Academy accounts for their classes. Layers handled all setup and ongoing support on behalf of schools—minimizing effort for both Khan Academy and local IT teams.

The process was simple and familiar for Khan Academy: they sent an invite through Clever, Layers accepted it on the school’s behalf, and set up sharing rules. Layers also embedded the Khan Academy SSO link directly into each school’s portal—making it effortless for students to log in. Students and teachers accessed Khan Academy through single sign-on (SSO) within the Layers Portal in Brazilian Portuguese.

Why It Matters 

Clever’s integration is designed to support any global edtech provider seeking fast, compliant entry into Brazil. With built-in rostering, SSO, and local support, you can scale across states without new development or technical overhead.

The Impact: Automated accounts and Instant Access for 1.75M Brazilian Students by Day One

Through this partnership, 1.75 million student accounts were provisioned automatically via Clever and accessed through SSO on the Layers Portal in time for the first day of school. Layers received reports from less than 0.05% of users during the rollout—a key win in a market where technical support can easily overwhelm both school and edtech teams.

🎥 Want to hear directly from Khan Academy and Layers on what they learned about scaling in Brazil? Join the live session on October 23rd at 10am PT / 1pm ET.

Ready to scale your platform to millions of Brazilian students—without a custom build? Book a 15-minute call with our team to learn how it works.