Acadomia Brand Guidelines: Paris 1989, Home Tutors & a Network of Agencies

A student, a service and a new name.

Acadomia began on 31 January 1989, French Wikipedia says, when Maxime Aiach, then a student, founded a home-tutoring service called Cours Études Secours. In 1995, the same source says, he brought in the advertising man Philippe Coléon to help with communication, and the business became more professional in how it recruited and paid its teachers. Acadomia’s own press kit, dated March 2026, calls Coléon its co-founder and president, and when the company changed hands in 2018 Private Equity Wire named Aiach, Coléon and José Dinis as the founders of its parent, Domia Group, with Aiach as president.

The model was unusual. French Wikipedia describes Acadomia as a mandataire: it signs a double mandate with families on one side and teachers on the other, so that the family, not the company, employs the teacher, and Acadomia handles the social-security paperwork. The teachers are often university students, the same source says, and anyone holding a three-year degree can teach. As a home-services provider, its lessons qualify for France’s tax credit for employment at home, which French Wikipedia says helped both the company and the wider sector to grow.

Growth came through agencies opened across France. French Wikipedia dates the company’s arrival on the stock market to April 2000 in one passage and to July 2001, on Alternext, in another. In 2009 the brand ran a campaign promising “bachelier ou remboursé” — pass the baccalauréat or your money back — which French Wikipedia calls controversial.

The company also branched out. French Wikipedia dates a move into wider home services to September 2004 and says the group counted 14 subsidiaries in October 2010, among them Spésup, focused on preparatory classes and first-year medicine and law. The same source says the business recorded losses in 2009 and 2010, had difficulty making its agency network pay in 2011, and was back in balance that year, and that it put money into group classes. It names Cours Legendre, Anacours and Complétude among the other home-tutoring firms in France.

From the doorstep to centres, screens and schools.

Home lessons remain the root of the business, but the company has added formats around them. Its 2026 press kit dates small-group courses in Acadomia centres to 2007, online private lessons to 2012, “Co-Learning” study spaces with school coaches to 2018, live online group classes to 2019, InstaCours, on-demand instant lessons, to 2022, and Terraskola, a programme for students aiming at selective higher education, to 2025.

The press kit lists the range under headings that include year-round tutoring, holiday courses, English and languages with Cambridge English, TOEIC and TOEFL preparation, music lessons under the Acadomia Musique name, methodology and coaching, and adult training. It also describes two independent secondary schools, the École A in Nice and in Paris, where classes run in small groups, and says the Paris school works with the drama school Cours Florent.

Sport is a further line. The press kit says that in 2020, at the request of the French Tennis Federation, Acadomia created a fully remote schooling programme, the E-Campus Acadomia, first for young tennis players and since opened to golf, swimming and riding.

Counts have been given at several dates. In May 2018 Private Equity Wire reported a network of 100 agencies and 20,000 tutors serving more than 90,000 students a year. IK Partners gives 106 agencies and about 100,000 students a year at its exit in October 2024, while Cinven, the buyer, gives 104 agencies and more than 150,000 families. The company’s March 2026 press kit gives 110 centres, 22,000 teachers and 550 educational advisers.

Tutoring brands and how they present themselves.

Tutoring brands sell something hard to picture: time with a teacher and steady practice. So they make it visible in other ways. The centre front is the first of them. Explore Learning says it opened its first centre in 2001 right beside the entrance of a supermarket in Chelmsford, so that parents could leave a child to work while they shopped; Kip McGrath says it began in 1976 in a family garage in Maitland, New South Wales, before growing into a franchise of locally run centres.

The second is the screen. Many of these companies now present their teaching through their own software, and give it a name of its own. Explore Learning calls its adaptive platform Compass and fills it with avatars and named characters; Kip McGrath calls its learning management system KipLearn and points parents to a portal for progress reports and bookings. Programme names, reward schemes and four-step “how it works” sequences do much of the explaining on their websites.

The third is the corporate page. A tutoring brand is often a network rather than a single business: franchisees run centres under one name while the company supplies curriculum, training and systems, as Kip McGrath’s 2026 shareholder documents describe. Ownership pages matter too. Explore Learning has been backed by Graphite Capital since a 2012 buyout, according to the trade title Unquote, and Kip McGrath, listed in Australia, became the subject of a takeover by Crimson Consulting in 2026.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, how many centres it reports and where — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Centre and student numbers are given as each source states them, with dates, because they change from year to year.

Owners, a regulator and a slogan.

Ownership has changed several times. French Wikipedia says that in February 2014 MCP Education, a company of the British investment firm Metric Capital Partners, made an offer for the shares it did not already hold, after which the shares were withdrawn from trading. On 18 May 2018 Private Equity Wire reported that IK Investment Partners’ Small Cap I fund, together with the founders, had bought Domia Group — owner of Acadomia and the home-cleaning brand Shiva — from Metric Capital Partners. IK Partners says it sold Domia to Cinven in October 2024, and Cinven lists Domia Group in its portfolio with that date.

There has been one regulatory decision. On 27 May 2010 Le Monde Informatique reported that France’s privacy regulator, the CNIL, had published a deliberation dated 22 April 2010 issuing a warning to an Acadomia subsidiary over its files under France’s Loi Informatique et Libertés, and that Acadomia had replied by disputing several inaccuracies and saying that some real problems were being resolved.

The brand speaks to parents directly. Its website, in November 2026, carries the line “À vos côtés pour réussir” — at your side to succeed — and a campaign called “Les bonnes notes, ça donne confiance,” good marks give confidence, built around three teenagers.

For a design guide, Acadomia shows how a tutoring brand built on home visits can stretch one name across agencies, online classes and its own schools. Compare Superprof, another Paris tutoring brand, and Tutor Doctor, a network of in-home tutors. For this guide we use plum, terracotta and chalk with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Acadomia’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.