Sabih
Bin Wasi

In 2012, Sabih Bin Wasi enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar with transfer credits from Pakistan, a desire to double-major in computer science, and no tool that could tell him whether any of it was possible. He did what engineers do when the solution doesn't exist: he built one. Over a weekend, he logged every course prerequisite and planned eight semesters on a spreadsheet. It took days. It shouldn't have.

That frustration was not unique to Sabih. His future co-founder Rukhsar Neyaz - later his wife - needed to convert her CS major to Electrical Engineering and had no visibility into what that meant for her graduation timeline. Musab Popatia wanted to finish in three years without taking on more debt. Three students, three distinct problems, one broken system. They started building together.

What began as a student project at CMU-Q was piloted at the university itself. Mark Stehlik, assistant dean and CS professor at CMU, saw its potential not just as a student tool but as something that could transform the relationship between advisors and students. The company is named Stellic in his honor - a quiet tribute built into the very identity of the enterprise.

CMU became Stellic's first paying client. Not a charity move - the university adopted it because it worked. Within a few years, 88% of CMU undergraduates were using it voluntarily for semester planning. That kind of adoption, unprompted, is a data point most EdTech founders never see.

After graduating in 2015, Sabih, Rukhsar, and Musab turned the project into a company. They secured seed funding from Qatar Science and Technology Park, completed a stint at the Alchemist Accelerator in Silicon Valley, and relocated to San Francisco. Karachi to Doha to San Francisco: the geography of ambition, compressed into three years.

By October 2019, Stellic had closed a $3.1 million seed round from Entangled Ventures, Rethink Education, Reach Capital, and a roster of angel investors including Arjun Singh, founder of Gradescope. That same year, Sabih and Rukhsar landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Education list. The platform was serving 15 universities and processing 300,000+ plan activities annually.

The Series A in March 2022 told a different story. Reach Capital led the $11 million round, joined by 15 edtech founder-investors: John Katzman (2U/Noodle), David Blake (Degreed), Matt Pittinsky (Blackboard), Dan Carroll (Clever). People who built the infrastructure of American higher education were betting on the company that wanted to rethink how students navigate it.

The metrics justified the confidence. Stellic had grown revenue 4x in the previous twelve months. Its Net Promoter Score sat above 80 - a number that most enterprise software companies frame and hang on the wall. And in five years of operation, Stellic had not lost a single university partner. Zero churn. In a market where institutions are risk-averse, slow to adopt, and quick to cancel anything that underperforms, that record is rare.

Sabih grew up in Karachi, the son of a teacher and a civil engineer. Both professions involve building things meant to last - classrooms, structures, systems. He arrived at CMU as a first-generation international student navigating an unfamiliar higher education system with no playbook. That position, precisely, is what made him the right person to build Stellic. He understood the confusion from the inside.

At the ASU+GSV Summit, Sabih argued that higher education is moving through a sequence of design problems: first access, then completion, and now post-graduate success. Most institutions are still solving completion. Stellic positions itself at the hinge point - the platform that helps students actually complete, not just enroll. One million students have used it. His stated goal: ten million success stories.

In December 2025, Sabih published an op-ed in University Business titled "Built backward: Why colleges must design tech systems around students." The argument is exactly what you'd expect from someone who built a tool because no one built it for him: institutions keep designing systems for administrators, then handing them to students. Flip the design direction. Start with the student. Build backward.

Today, Stellic runs four core products: Progress (degree auditing and planning), Care (advisor workflows and alerts), Explore (for prospective and transfer students), and Registration (end-to-end enrollment). The platform is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, FERPA compliant, and has received a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant validating its equity mission. The company has 110 employees distributed across San Francisco and remote locations worldwide.

The thing about Sabih Wasi is that the spreadsheet story is not a founding myth retrofitted for investor decks. It's the actual explanation for why every design decision in Stellic traces back to student experience rather than administrative convenience. He was the confused student. He wrote the spreadsheet. He knows exactly what it felt like to not have the tool.