Who he is now
He sells a strange promise to universities: let the data tell you which student is about to disappear - while there's still time to help.
Miguel Molina Cosculluela runs Analytikus, an education-technology company headquartered on Brickell Avenue in Miami. The pitch is deceptively gentle. Every student leaves a digital wake - logins, submissions, silences, the rhythm of when they show up and when they stop. Analytikus reads that wake and turns it into a nudge that arrives at the right moment, to the right person, before a withdrawal form does.
He co-founded the company with data scientist Armando Alvarez Govela, and the two built it around a single conviction: education should be personalized at scale, not by adding more meetings, but by adding better signals. Analytikus calls the result the Augmented University - a phrase that draws a careful line. Augmented, not automated. The teacher stays. The machine just hands them a flashlight.
The product family wears classical names with a modern job. There is SEAL, the integrated analytics platform. There is SOCRATES, a virtual assistant. There is EMILIA, built for student support. The branding is a small joke that tells you something about the founder - a man who studied at the Sorbonne and now teaches algorithms to behave like patient tutors.
Cosculluela did not arrive at education first. He arrived at analytics first, and education came as the place that needed it most. He spent more than a decade in the data business before Analytikus, with stops that include Hewlett-Packard and ventures named Intellego, Quaxar and World Climate Credit. Somewhere in there he co-founded a startup that won a Startup Weekend in Geneva - the photo survives, him in a black shirt under a slide reading "Awareness, Communities & Partners," talking with his hands.
He is, by his own description, an analytics evangelist. The word fits. He hosts a bilingual podcast called Simplifying Analytics, where he interviews the data scientists, vendors and big-data practitioners most people never get to overhear. The title is the thesis: if the analytics can't be explained, it can't be trusted, and if it can't be trusted, it won't be used. He once made the same argument on CNN, where he turned up to talk about why a real analytics strategy is a competitive advantage rather than a dashboard.
His education reads like a passport. IESE Business School in Spain. Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. The Sorbonne in Paris. Essex in England. Four countries, four ways of thinking about a problem - which may explain why he is comfortable building a company that is bilingual by default and global by instinct.
And then there is the part that has nothing to do with data, except that it explains all of it. Cosculluela is an Ironman 70.3 finisher - a 70.3-mile swim-bike-run for people who enjoy negotiating with their own limits. He is also a self-described genealogy aficionado, the kind of person who traces family trees for fun. Read those two hobbies together and the founder comes into focus: someone who likes long, hard problems, and someone who can't resist following a thread back to where it started. A student's struggle is just another thread. He wants to find the root before it's too late.
Today the work is squarely about AI in higher education - recruitment, retention, teaching, dropout prevention. In 2024, Analytikus partnered with Frequency Foundry to push harder on EdTech innovation, and Cosculluela kept showing up where the sector argues with itself, from EDUCAUSE to BETT. The message rarely changes. The tools change constantly. The students, he would tell you, are the only metric that matters.