Superprof Brand Guidelines: A Paris Tutor Marketplace Built on Takeovers

From notices at the bakery to a website.

Superprof is a website where tutors post profiles and students choose whom to contact. It began in Paris in August 2013: the tech site FrenchWeb, profiling it in May 2014, called it a Parisian start-up founded that month and quoted its founder Wilfried Granier saying the site went live on 9 August 2013. Accounts of the founding team differ. Maddyness, in April 2015, named Granier and Yann Leguillon as the two co-founders, both engineers; FrenchWeb listed a third, Julien Bâteau, in 2014 and again in 2017.

Maddyness told the origin story as a familiar one: an engineering student hoping to pay for his studies by giving lessons, and the handwritten notices pinned up in bakeries, scattered, hard to read and unsorted, which the founders thought deserved something better. The company’s own ten-year retrospective, published on its blog in 2023, says Granier, an engineer and former KPMG consultant and Ernst & Young manager, first imagined the idea in Biarritz, and that he wanted to build “the Airbnb of private lessons.”

The same retrospective says Superprof merged with another French listings site, cherche-cours.com, a few months after launch. In the early press the name was often set as SuperPROF, with the second half in capitals, and Maddyness wrote “SuperProf”; the company now writes it as one capitalised word, Superprof.

A directory of subjects, not just school.

From the start the site was pitched as broader than homework help. Granier told FrenchWeb in 2014 that members could share knowledge in more than 250 fields, not only school subjects, and that Superprof was not a financial intermediary: the student paid the tutor directly. Maddyness gave the range in 2015 as school subjects, sports, arts and hobbies, and described the checks the site ran on tutors — diplomas, identity, telephone, and how quickly and how often they replied — together with a dashboard where tutors post their lessons, courses and workshops and message students.

The idea behind the brand, as the company’s 2023 retrospective puts it, is that everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn; Maddyness reported the same thought in 2015, and said the founders wanted students to choose their tutors freely and work with them directly.

The subject list has kept growing. In a May 2024 press release carried by K-12 Dive, the company said its network covered more than 2,000 subjects across 50 countries and 25 languages, and that it had signed up 100,000 students and held 125,000 lessons in the United States. Those are the company’s own figures. Leaders League, in March 2023, described the operation as “multi-local” in Granier’s words: country managers are local hires, and the Irish site uses the local word “grinds” for intensive tuition rather than copying the British or American page.

How the category presents itself.

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.

Growth by opening countries and buying rivals.

Superprof went abroad almost at once. Its 2023 retrospective says it entered Belgium and Switzerland in 2014; Leaders League reported that Granier launched Spain in 2014 and then Brazil. By April 2015 Maddyness counted France and eleven other countries, with more than 250,000 listings across 250 subjects, and noted that the foreign sites were then free for both students and tutors; and in September 2015 the same site reported that Superprof had bought DonProfesor, a Spanish private-lessons site based in Barcelona, for cash, to be merged into its Spanish site; at that point the company said it was in twelve countries and six languages, spanning Europe, the United States, Canada and Brazil, and planned to add Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Argentina. The company’s retrospective puts its tutor community at 100,000 in 2014 and more than a million by 2017.

Buying competitors became the pattern. The company says it acquired The Tutor Pages, a London home-tutoring business, in 2018, and the French rival Kelprof in June 2022. Leaders League reported in March 2023 that Superprof had bought Kelprof and the English company Tutorfair in 2022, bringing to sixteen the competitors it had taken over in ten years, and quoted Granier explaining that in each new country the local manager contacts competitors to signal an interest in buying them; the company’s own retrospective puts its total at fifteen acquisitions. The same article said Superprof was present in 41 countries, was headquartered in Paris, and had grown without bringing in outside investors, quoting Granier: “I wanted to create the company of my dreams and to remain totally free.” In January 2025 CB News reported that Superprof had taken a stake in Spliiit, a subscription-sharing start-up, for an undisclosed amount.

Sources describe the leadership differently. The 2023 retrospective says Camille Lemardeley, who joined in the company’s early years, became chief executive in 2020; Leaders League called Granier the company’s president in 2023, and the May 2024 press release named him chief executive and co-founder.

For a design guide, Superprof shows how a marketplace brand can stay recognisable while each country site speaks in local terms. Compare Acadomia, a French tutoring company, and italki, another marketplace that connects learners with independent teachers. For this guide we use plum, night ink and ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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