A degree-management platform built by three undergrads who got tired of guessing whether they'd graduate. Today, more than 80 universities and a million students run on it.
It is a Tuesday in mid-April, the season when degree audits historically pile up like unpaid parking tickets. Somewhere on the Duke campus, a registrar is closing her laptop at 4:47 PM. Two years ago, she would have been there until ten.
That quiet is what Stellic sells. The San Mateo company, founded by three Carnegie Mellon undergraduates who couldn't figure out their own degree requirements, now powers degree management at 80+ universities. Carnegie Mellon, Duke, UCLA, Florida State, the University of Virginia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, UNSW Sydney - the customer list reads less like a sales pipeline and more like the front of a college guidebook.
Stellic is technically a software company. Functionally, it is a translation layer between the byzantine rulebook of a four-year degree and the actual human being trying to earn one. Every audit, every prerequisite, every transfer credit dispute, every "wait, does this count?" - Stellic catches it before it becomes a graduation delay.
Here is the awkward arithmetic of American higher education. Two in five students starting a four-year degree won't have it six years later. Forty-three percent of credits get lost in transfer. The average cost of a retaken three-credit course is $2,400 - charged, predictably, to the people who could least afford it the first time around.
For decades, the response from edtech has been to build a better learning management system - software for what happens inside a course. But the failure mode for most students has very little to do with what happens inside the course. It has to do with whether the course should have been taken at all. Whether the credits transferred. Whether the prerequisite was waived. Whether anyone in an office on the second floor of the registrar building had the bandwidth to answer that question before the registration window closed.
This was the gap Stellic decided to live in. Unglamorous. Spreadsheet-shaped. Almost rude in its specificity.
Sabih Bin Wasi, Rukhsar Neyaz, and Musab Popatia were students at Carnegie Mellon in 2016, doing the same thing every undergraduate has done since the invention of the elective: trying to figure out, with absolutely insufficient tooling, whether they were on track. They started building something better mostly for themselves. They called it Stellic, after Mark Stehlik - the CMU professor and longtime advisor who pushed them to keep going.
The bet was simple and slightly preposterous. They would sell software to universities. Universities, which are famously slow buyers. Of a category, degree audit, dominated by aging enterprise vendors. From a dorm room. With no customers.
CMU's registrar said yes anyway. The product was barely out of beta in 2017 when Carnegie Mellon signed. Eight years later, that bet looks less like risk and more like underwriting - the university that bet first now serves 16,000 of its students through Stellic, and the alumni who built it raised $11 million from Reach Capital and a Who's Who of edtech: John Katzman (2U/Noodle), David Blake (Degreed), Matt Pittinsky (Blackboard), Dan Carroll (Clever).
Stellic ships as a suite, though most students experience it as a single thing - a clean interface that knows what they've taken, what they still owe, and what happens if they swap a class. Advisors and registrars get a different view of the same data, and the data is, refreshingly, the same.
Student-facing audit, planner, and registration. The piece that replaces the PDF an advisor used to email.
Advisor workflows, caseload management, and early-intervention alerts for the students drifting off track.
Transfer credit articulation and prospective-student pathways. Where the 43% problem lives.
Institutional reporting on demand, retention, and graduation. The slide the provost actually looks at.
Reach Capital does not write $11 million checks for vibes. The proof, where universities have shared it publicly, is mostly about time - the unsexy commodity that registrars and advisors are short on, and that Stellic hands back in measurable chunks.
More than 80 institutions are now live - Carnegie Mellon, Duke, UCLA, Florida State, Virginia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Ohio State, Indiana, TCU, Colorado College, UNSW Sydney. The University of Oklahoma's provost called it "technology we've been waiting for." A Colorado College student described what life would be like without it as "the relief I'd feel if it were taken away," which is either the most damning or the most flattering testimonial in the history of edtech, depending on how you read it.
"We create the opportunities that let students transform their futures." That is the entire thing. No moonshots, no manifesto, no Latin.
Stellic's worldview is that higher education is fundamentally an opportunity engine, and that the engine has been losing efficiency for thirty years because nobody upgraded the software in the back office. The advisors are excellent. The professors are excellent. The students are excellent. The PDF reports are not excellent. Fix the PDF, and the system starts to work again - not perfectly, not all at once, but more than it did yesterday.
The investor pitch was the same. Reach Capital backed it because Reach Capital backs companies that move equity outcomes in higher education. The Impact Engine backed it for the same reason. The 15 edtech founders who wrote angel checks - Katzman, Blake, Pittinsky, Carroll - had spent decades watching this category go nowhere. They saw the founders. They read the contract. They wrote.
The company is named after Mark Stehlik, a CMU professor who told the founders to build it. Most startups are named after Norse gods. This one is named after an advisor.
CMU signed in 2017 with no comparable customer, no track record, and a barely-beta product. Eight years later, they're still on it.
"The North Star." That's it. That was the entire creative direction. The mark is, accordingly, a star.
Reach Capital led. Then Katzman, Blake, Pittinsky, Carroll. If you're keeping score, that's 2U, Degreed, Blackboard, and Clever. Mt. Rushmore of edtech.
HQ is at 204 2nd Ave in San Mateo. The team is roughly 110 people, many remote, many with registrar backgrounds.
16,000 CMU students currently use Stellic. The founders are alumni. The closest thing to a feedback loop in a technology company.
Return to Tuesday afternoon. The registrar at Duke is closing her laptop. The senior who would have called her in a panic about a missing humanities credit pulled up Stellic on her phone instead, saw that the course she was about to register for would in fact complete the requirement, hit submit, and walked to lunch.
None of this is a revolution. It is, in fact, the opposite of a revolution - a small, mostly invisible piece of infrastructure quietly absorbing a problem that used to consume an enormous amount of institutional energy. A million students using software they barely notice, run by 80+ universities that used to do this work by hand.
That is what Stellic is for. Not to disrupt higher education - higher education has been disrupted enough. To run it better. The kind of company that picks an unglamorous problem, builds the right thing, sells it patiently to a slow industry, and waits eight years for the rest of the world to notice. The phone isn't ringing because the system is working. That, finally, is the news.