The Platform Rewiring How Districts Plan a Student's Future
Every high schooler hears the same instruction: figure out your future. Very few are handed the tools to actually do it. SchooLinks, an Austin-based education-technology company, was built to close that gap - not with another college-search box, but with a single system that carries a student from an elementary-school interest inventory all the way to a signed internship offer.
Founded in 2015 by Katie Fang, SchooLinks sells to the institutions that sit between a student and their options: K-12 school districts and state education agencies. Its product is a college and career readiness platform - "CCR" in the trade - and its pitch is deceptively simple. Districts have spent years stitching together separate tools for counseling, course planning, career exploration, work-based learning and state compliance reporting. SchooLinks collapses those into one.
The company's own framing is plainer than most of its rivals': "We exist to maximize the societal and economic potential of our nation's youth by helping educational institutions prepare students for success in life." It bills itself as "a college and career platform for modern students," and the word doing the work there is modern. The category it competes in was largely defined two decades ago.
"We exist to maximize the societal and economic potential of our nation's youth by helping educational institutions prepare students for success in life."
What SchooLinks actually does
At its core, the platform is a planning and accountability engine. For students, it accumulates behavioral data - the careers they browse, the courses they pick, the assessments they take - and uses machine-learning models to personalize college and career recommendations and surface the right next task at the right time through an intelligent home feed. For administrators, the same data powers dashboards that monitor whether a district is on track to hit its college and career readiness outcomes.
That dual audience is the whole trick. A tool that only motivates teenagers doesn't get renewed by a superintendent; a tool that only satisfies a state reporting requirement doesn't get used by a 16-year-old. SchooLinks tries to solve both problems inside one product - the student's motivation and the administrator's compliance headache.
Who uses it, and at what scale
The platform runs across 40 U.S. states. According to the company, it now serves roughly 15 times the districts and 10 times the students it had at its Series A round - growth that put it on the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing companies three years running, in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The users inside those contracts are students, counselors, administrators, parents and, increasingly, employer partners who post real opportunities.
"A college and career platform for modern students."
The problems it solves
The first problem is fragmentation. Districts historically bought a college-counseling tool from one vendor, a career-interest inventory from another, a course planner from a third, and tracked work-based-learning hours in spreadsheets. Each system spoke its own language, and a student's record didn't travel between them. SchooLinks' answer is continuity: every goal, interest inventory, portfolio entry and personalized plan a student builds in elementary school carries forward automatically into middle and high school - no exports, no re-onboarding, no starting over.
The second problem is compliance. Every state defines college and career readiness differently - Texas has its CCMR indicators, New York has CDOS - and districts are graded on them. SchooLinks ships a configurable compliance framework that adapts to state and district requirements and tracks the state-mandated activities, assessments, goals and course plans that feed those metrics. It turns a reporting scramble into a background process.
The third problem is engagement, and it is the one competitors underrate. SchooLinks was designed student-first: mobile, multilingual, age-appropriate and gamified, with parents able to collaborate on their children's plans and students able to message teachers and staff while keeping guardians in the conversation. A future built with the family, the company argues, sticks better than one built alone.
How it differs from the incumbent
The name that comes up in almost every SchooLinks sales conversation is Naviance, PowerSchool's long-dominant college-counseling product. Naviance was built more than twenty years ago as a counseling tool, with career features layered on and work-based learning treated as an afterthought. SchooLinks launched in 2015 with the opposite center of gravity - a modern, mobile interface and career and work-based learning as first-class products rather than add-ons. Student newspapers across the country have documented the switch, sometimes bluntly headlining SchooLinks as "the new Naviance."
| Capability | SchooLinks | Legacy incumbent |
|---|---|---|
| Student-first mobile design | Yes | Retrofitted |
| Work-based learning as core | Yes | Add-on |
| Parent collaboration in-app | Yes | Limited |
| K-12 continuous record | Yes | Fragmented |
| Configurable state compliance | Yes | Partial |
The money
In October 2024, SchooLinks announced an $80 million Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, with participation from Stephens Group, Strada Education Foundation and American Student Assistance. It was, by multiple accounts, the largest U.S. edtech funding round of the year. Forbes reported that the round traced back to an unsolicited term sheet - an investor came to SchooLinks, not the other way around. The raise brought the company's total funding to roughly $90.6 million, earmarked to expand its CCR suite, deepen the connective tissue between K-12, higher education and employers, and push toward all 50 states.
Where it fits in the market
SchooLinks sits in the K-12 college and career readiness segment of edtech, a market that spent years under one incumbent and now supports half a dozen credible platforms - Xello, Scoir, MaiaLearning and others among them. Its business model is B2B/B2B2C SaaS: multi-year district subscriptions, generally priced by student or district, sold to administrators but lived in by students and families. The company's expertise is concentrated where those two worlds meet - behavioral data and machine learning on one side, the unglamorous mechanics of state accountability on the other. In 2026 it went a step earlier in the journey, launching a fully rebuilt K-5 career readiness platform that puts each district's own identity at the center. The bet running through all of it is continuity: that the district which owns a student's record from third grade to graduation is the one that keeps the contract.