Company File / Education Technology / Founded 2015 / Miami, FL
Knack
The peer-tutoring platform turning a college's best students into paid teachers - and turning tutoring into higher graduation rates.
The peer-tutoring platform turning a college's best students into paid teachers - and turning tutoring into higher graduation rates.
Every college campus already contains its own faculty of experts. They are not in the faculty lounge. They are in the third row - the sophomore who aced organic chemistry, the senior who breezed through calculus, the student who finally cracked a course that half the class is failing. Knack, a student-success company founded in 2015 and headquartered in Miami, was built on the wager that this hidden talent is the most underused resource in higher education.
The company gives colleges and universities a single platform to find those high-achieving students, train them, pay them, and connect them to classmates who need help. Tutoring happens over web and mobile apps or inside a virtual classroom with a shared whiteboard, video, and screen sharing. Sessions can be one-on-one or in groups, booked once or set to recur. For the institution, what was once a small, hard-to-staff tutoring center becomes a program that can scale to meet an entire student body - from freshman orientation through senior-year finals.
It is a deceptively simple product built on a stubborn problem. Colleges are judged, increasingly, on whether the students they enroll actually graduate. Tutoring is one of the few interventions with a direct line to that outcome, yet traditional tutoring centers reach only a sliver of students. Knack's answer is to make academic help feel less like an institution and more like texting a friend who has been there.
Figures reported by Knack from partner institutions. Treat them as company-reported outcomes, not audited results.
Knack's customers are institutions - dozens of them named publicly, including the University of Florida, Georgia Tech, Northeastern, Fordham, Auburn, Rutgers, the University of San Diego, the University of Maine, Virginia Tech, Hampton University, Kansas State, Miami Dade College, Temple, Indiana University, and the University of Connecticut. But the people who make the platform work are students on both sides of the session: the ones seeking help and the ones being paid to give it.
The problem Knack targets is retention. A student who fails a gateway course is far more likely to leave school, and every departure costs the institution tuition revenue and the student a degree. Tutoring helps, but the old model has a reach ceiling and a stigma problem - Knack reports that 53% of the students who use it had never sought academic support before. By reframing help as peer-to-peer, the company aims to pull in exactly the students who would never walk into a tutoring center.
Traditional tutoring centers serve a small fraction of students. Knack scales support to the whole campus by activating student tutors already on it.
Many students avoid formal help. Peer support lowers the barrier - it feels like asking a classmate, not admitting defeat.
Failed gateway courses drive dropouts. Knack ties tutoring activity to grades and persistence so institutions can see the effect.
High-achieving students get flexible, paid, on-campus work - collectively earning millions through the platform.
What gets me excited everyday is the fact that our business is social impact driven, with the goal of impacting student success.
Web and mobile apps to recruit, schedule, and pay tutors. Supports 1:1 and group sessions, recurring bookings, and single-sign-on onboarding tied to campus accounts.
A virtual room with real-time whiteboard, audio, video, and screen sharing so tutoring works at a distance as well as in person.
Marketing support and structured, CRLA-aligned training to identify strong students and onboard them as paid independent-contractor tutors.
Dashboards that connect tutoring activity to grades, persistence, and graduation, giving administrators evidence, not just anecdotes.
Knack runs on a B2B2C model. Colleges and universities pay to power their peer-learning programs; Knack supplies the software, the tutor recruitment and training, and the payments infrastructure. Student tutors are paid as independent contractors, which lets support scale without an institution hiring a large tutoring staff.
That structure is also what sets Knack apart. General tutoring marketplaces such as Tutor.com or TutorOcean connect learners to outside tutors for a fee. Knack does the opposite - it keeps help inside the institution, sourced from students who took the exact same courses with the exact same professors. The tutor understands the syllabus because they lived it last semester.
Compared with in-house tutoring-center software, Knack brings the marketplace mechanics: recruitment, matching, scheduling, payments, and analytics in one system. Compared with broad student-success suites focused on advising and early alerts, Knack is specialized in the tutoring layer itself and the human supply that powers it.
The incentives line up unusually well. A tutor earns money and a resume credential. The student they help is more likely to pass and stay enrolled. The college keeps tuition revenue and improves its retention metrics. Three parties, one session - which is a large part of why Knack's model has spread across hundreds of campuses.
Knack was founded in 2015 by Samyr Qureshi and co-founders on a single conviction: the best means of learning is from a peer. Before the company, Qureshi worked at Gartner as an emerging-technology account executive. His advice to founders, drawn from Knack's own early years, is to delay fundraising, talk to customers relentlessly, ship a minimum product, and only chase capital once product-market fit is real.
In October 2025, Knack raised a Series B led by New Markets Venture Partners and named Megan Dusenbery its chief executive; Qureshi moved to Executive Chairman of the board. Dusenbery brings nearly two decades in higher education, most recently as Chief Partnerships Officer at the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) and previously as Senior Vice President of Higher Education at Kaplan. The company's cap table mixes venture firms - Precursor Ventures, Resurgens Technology Partners, New Markets - with education heavyweights including ETS and Chegg.
What excites me most about Knack is that our platform not only delivers measurable retention outcomes for institutions but also creates paid, high-impact job opportunities.
Samyr Qureshi and co-founders launch the company on the belief that the best learning happens between peers.
Precursor Ventures' Charles Hudson and Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik co-lead an early raise.
The online classroom becomes central as campuses shift to remote learning during the pandemic.
Partnerships expand across flagship universities and community colleges.
New Markets Venture Partners leads a Series B; Megan Dusenbery becomes CEO, Qureshi moves to Executive Chairman.
Founder Samyr Qureshi sold emerging technology at Gartner before betting on peer learning.
More than half of students on Knack had never used any academic support before trying it.
Partners report roughly a 500% average jump in the size of their campus tutor networks.
Its backers mix pure VCs with education giants ETS and Chegg on the same cap table.
Search links to Knack's own video and product content.
Knack gives colleges and universities a platform to run peer-tutoring programs - recruiting, training, scheduling, and paying high-achieving students to tutor their classmates online and in person.
Higher-education institutions - hundreds of campuses including the University of Florida, Georgia Tech, Northeastern, Fordham, and Auburn - along with the students who tutor and the students they help.
It was founded in 2015 by Samyr Qureshi and co-founders. In October 2025, Megan Dusenbery became CEO and Qureshi transitioned to Executive Chairman.
Institutions pay Knack to power their peer-learning programs; Knack supplies the software, tutor recruitment, training, and payments, while student tutors are paid as independent contractors.
Knack reports partner results such as 91% of students seeing higher grades, an 18.5% grade lift for at-risk weekly tutoring recipients, and improved persistence and graduation rates.