How Gumlet helped scale up video experiences for more than 2 million students

Scaleup is one of Brazil's fastest-growing ed-tech platforms, delivering video courses to over 150 universities and online schools. With 2 million+ students relying on their platform daily, smooth, buffer-free video delivery was never a nice-to-have, it’s critical.

But as Scaleup's streaming volumes grew non-linearly, their existing infrastructure became a liability.

What went wrong?

1. Unsustainable CDN costs were expensive for TBs of monthly streaming, and volumes were only climbing
2. The team manually downloaded MP3 files from clients and ran them through Whisper for transcription. A process that couldn't scale
3. Subtitles were being handled outside the platform, and there was no easy way to access transcribed text
4. Basic needs like automatic thumbnail generation and structured content organization required workarounds or manual effort

To scale successfully, they needed a solution that could deliver seamless streaming, boost learner engagement, and drive more conversions - all without unpredictable costs or technical limitations.

Enter Gumlet

Scaleup evaluated multiple providers, including Cloudflare and Bunny CDN. Gumlet stood out for offering a complete video platform that addressed every pain point in a single stack. They got:

1. Predictable, scale-friendly pricing that eliminated the fear of runaway CDN bills, even at hundreds of TB monthly and growing.
2. Seamless migration of video content with minimal disruption to 2M+ active learners
3. Full access to transcription files for building AI-powered features by replacing the manual Whisper workflow entirely
4. Automatic thumbnail generation removes the need to do this manually
5. Flexible content organization via Collections, Playlists, and Tags to replace their existing unlimited folder structure
6. MP3 download support for audio-only use cases across their institution's network

Beyond features, Scaleup gained Gumlet's adaptive bitrate streaming, global CDN delivery optimized for emerging markets like Brazil, and a 99.95% uptime SLA - ensuring students experience smooth, buffer-free playback on any device and any network.

In the words of Frederico, Scaleup's Founder & CEO

"We were about to lose the Google credits and face the full CDN costs at scale. Gumlet gave us a video platform that not only reduced our infrastructure spend but also eliminated hours of manual transcription. It's exactly what we needed to keep scaling."

The numbers tell the story

• 23+ hours of engineering time saved per month
• 2M+ students with uninterrupted, buffer-free video learning
• 44% reduction in bandwidth usage
• 100 TB+ monthly streaming delivered reliably
• 52% reduction in cloud spend
• <2 weeks to completely migrate with zero downtime
• 100,000s of minutes of video hosted & transcoded