Katie Fang

The founder who taught herself to code, then taught districts to plan

Katie Fang runs SchooLinks from an office on Brazos Street in downtown Austin, where the company she started with about $5,000 now helps millions of students figure out what comes after high school.

Today SchooLinks is an enterprise software company. Its platform sits inside K-12 school districts and walks students through self-discovery, career exploration, and the machinery of college applications, while giving counselors and administrators the dashboards they need to see who is on track and who is drifting. That district-wide reach is the version of the company Fang eventually built. It is not the version she started with, and the distance between the two is most of her story.

She grew up in Shanghai and left her hometown at 12. By the time she finished school she had studied in four different countries, learning English as a second language along the way. That itinerant education gave her an unusually direct encounter with the problem she would later spend years solving: choosing a school, especially from the outside as an international student, is confusing, opaque, and lonely. She worked out the fundamentals the hard way, and then something predictable happened. Friends asked for help. Then family members asked. The requests kept coming, and somewhere in that pattern she found the idea for a company.

She had a finance degree from the University of British Columbia, not a computer science one. That did not stop her. She told her parents about the idea, put roughly $5,000 of her own savings behind it, and coded the first version of SchooLinks herself, learning as she went and clearing each technical problem one at a time. It is a detail worth sitting with: the first product came from a first-time founder who was also a first-time engineer, shipping something because no one else was going to do it for her.

A house full of interns

The early operation was scrappy in the way that later becomes founder folklore. She posted internship flyers on a college campus and built up a team of about a dozen interns. Seven of them lived in the same house. In 2015 she was accepted into Capital Factory, the Austin accelerator that anchors a good part of the city's startup scene, and that acceptance is what pulled her to Texas. Austin has been home base ever since.

The original SchooLinks was a student-facing app. It is easy to imagine a version of history where it stayed that way, chasing individual users one download at a time. Instead Fang made the harder call. She pivoted the company toward selling entire school districts. Enterprise sales in education are slow and bureaucratic; the buyers are cautious and the procurement cycles are long. But the impact multiplies. A single district contract puts the product in front of thousands of students at once, and it aligns the company's incentives with the institutions that are actually responsible for student outcomes. That pivot is the hinge the whole business turns on.

The bet paid off in the metrics that get a company noticed. SchooLinks landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies three years running - 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023 Fast Company named it one of the top 10 most innovative companies in education. The platform leans on machine learning and behavioral data to personalize college recommendations, and it gives districts accountability tools to track college and career readiness at scale, which matters in a policy environment where states increasingly ask schools to report exactly those outcomes.

Recognition, and what it's for

Fang was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Education in 2018, at 26. She has also been recognized as one of the Top Texans Under 30 and a Young Woman to Watch, and she appeared on the cover of Austin Woman magazine. The awards are real, but they are not the point. They are shorthand for a longer proof: that a first-time, immigrant, self-taught founder could build and lead a company through the unglamorous middle years - the hiring, the executive team, the enterprise sales motion - and come out the other side with a business that institutions depend on.

The funding tells the same story in numbers. SchooLinks raised an $8.3 million Series A in 2021, and by late 2024 it had closed a Series B of roughly $80 million, bringing total funding to about $90 million. That is capital raised against a category - college and career readiness - that most people outside of education never think about, and that most students inside it experience as a source of stress. Fang's whole pitch is that it does not have to be. Give a student a map early enough, and the future stops looking like a cliff.

What is striking about Fang is how tightly the company maps to her own biography. She was the international student who could not find good tools, so she built them. She was the non-engineer who needed software, so she wrote it. She was the outsider who had to figure out the system without a guide, so she built the guide and gave it to the institutions that reach every kid, not just the ones who already know to ask. The company is, in a real sense, the thing she needed at 12, scaled up to serve people she will never meet.

SchooLinks now employs more than 180 people and reports annual revenue in the millions, with a technology stack that spans the modern startup toolkit - Python and TypeScript, AWS and PostgreSQL, and newer additions like AI tooling woven into the product and the workflow. But the throughline is not the tech. It is the conviction, formed young and across borders, that no student should have to navigate their own future alone. Fang built a company to make sure fewer of them do.