He leads Studyportals, the platform that helps students the world over find a place to study - built from the frustration of not being able to find one himself.
Co-founder & CEO, Studyportals · Eindhoven, NL
Today Edwin van Rest runs one of the largest study-choice platforms on the internet. Studyportals, the company he co-founded in 2007 and still leads as CEO, indexes hundreds of thousands of degree programs and reaches millions of students a month. Its portals - Mastersportal, Bachelorsportal and others - let a student in one country search for a program in another and actually compare the options side by side.
The current mission is deliberately large: make study choice transparent for everyone, everywhere, so that no student misses an opportunity because they never heard it existed. Van Rest frames the scale plainly. There are roughly 230 million university students in the world now, a number expected to reach 350 million by 2030, and by his reckoning about a billion people still lack good access to information about their own education options. Closing that gap is the work.
He did not arrive at that mission through a market study. He arrived at it through his own experience. As a student in Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Eindhoven University of Technology, van Rest spent a year on exchange at Osaka University in Japan. Arranging it took him something close to eighteen months of bureaucratic back-and-forth. The year itself was worth every form. He came home full of stories, and again and again his friends told him the same thing: I wish I had known that was even possible.
That refrain - I wish I had known - became the company. If the information had been hard for him to find, with time and motivation on his side, it was effectively invisible to everyone else.
We wanted to send more students abroad than there are soldiers abroad.
Studyportals grew out of a student network rather than a garage. It began as a spin-off of the ESTIEM Student Guide, the sort of side project that stays a side project for most people. The turning point, van Rest says, came when he visited his co-founder Magnus in Stockholm. Magnus had already started a business and told him bluntly that if they wanted to do this well, they should form a real company - and offered to commit his time to it.
"That was really the defining moment," van Rest has said. "Then we just got a couple of beers and started to work." Out of that evening came mastersportal.eu, a place where students could search Master's programs across borders. He built it with two alumni from TU/e and KTH.
The timing helped. Europe's Bologna Process had split degrees into the Bachelor's and Master's structure, and the number of Master's programs on the continent exploded - from around 500 in 2000 to tens of thousands within a decade. Suddenly there was a genuine need for a map, and Studyportals was building one.
Van Rest runs the company like a product shop. In the early years the team shipped website updates weekly, kept a dedicated group whose only job was talking to students about what they actually needed, and leaned on international testers for direct feedback. The instinct - test, listen, iterate - has stayed.
Ask van Rest why any of this matters and the answer is not about market size. "If countries understand each other, there is less chance of war," he says. He points to programs designed to move students between countries as much for diplomacy as for degrees, and to his own experience of living with a German roommate in Japan, where he watched cultural stereotypes dissolve through nothing more than daily contact.
That belief is baked into the company's original, half-absurd benchmark: send more students abroad than there are soldiers deployed abroad. It sounded like a slogan. It stopped being one. Studyportals has since helped enable more than 600,000 international study placements.
He has stayed close to the sector he serves. Van Rest chairs the Marketing & Recruitment Expert Community of the EAIE, the European Association for International Education, and is a frequent speaker at international education conferences. In 2013 the EAIE gave him its Rising Star Award for a notable contribution to the field early in his career. He also won McKinsey & Company's New Venture competition for the most promising social start-up.
Strategy consultant on project management and analytics; IT services teams for the Athens and Turin Olympic Games; exchange year at Osaka University, Japan.
Co-founds Studyportals with two alumni from TU/e and KTH, launching mastersportal.eu for cross-border Master's search.
Mastersportal reaches roughly 2.1 million monthly visitors; the company expands into distance-learning and additional program portals.
Honored with the EAIE Rising Star Award for contribution to international education.
Studyportals raises a Series A round of about USD 5.5 million.
Continues as CEO, chairs the EAIE Marketing & Recruitment Expert Community, and speaks widely on international education.
Arranging his own year abroad took roughly eighteen months of bureaucratic hassle - the exact friction Studyportals now exists to remove.
Living with a German roommate in Japan taught him how fast stereotypes dissolve when people actually share a kitchen.
He is partial to the International Vintage Master, an Erasmus Mundus program in viticulture and winemaking spanning Spain, Italy, Hungary, Portugal and France.
He donated to TU/e's talent campaign to repay the university support that made his transformative Japan year possible.
Before founding a company he worked the IT services teams for the Athens and Turin Olympic Games.
Studyportals began as a spin-off of the ESTIEM Student Guide - a student-network project that outgrew its origins.
The Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as CEO of Studyportals, an Eindhoven-based platform that helps students compare study programs internationally.
In 2007, with two engineering friends, after his own year abroad in Japan revealed how little information existed about international study options.
To make study choice transparent worldwide so no student misses an educational opportunity because of an information gap.
He won the 2013 EAIE Rising Star Award and McKinsey & Company's New Venture competition for most promising social start-up.
At 280 Philitelaan in Eindhoven, in the Noord-Brabant province of the Netherlands.