college-admissions
(21)
The SAT Tutor Who Put the College Search in a Pocket
Edupath began with a simple wager: students might work harder for a school they chose themselves. Its phone app joined college discovery, test practice and application chores - then traveled from Berkeley classrooms to a Chinese test-prep giant.
Luke Skurman Built a Company Out of the Choice He Couldn’t Make
He went looking for the truth behind college brochures. Two dozen years and several business models later, Luke Skurman is still trying to make the biggest decisions feel less like a roll of the dice.
The Art School That Teaches the Application
In Irvine, one small academy has turned the art portfolio from a mysterious bundle of work into a coached, critiqued and highly specific admissions instrument.
The College Counselor Who Fired Her Business Model
Jessica Velasco meant to sell private college counseling. Then she decided the model was wrong for her - and built a free, searchable answer desk for families who could not afford the velvet-rope version.
The Boston Tutoring Company That Bet 50,000 Kids on One Idea: Send the Teacher to the Kitchen Table
Rich Enos and Greg Zumas skipped the storefront, sent tutors into living rooms, and turned a one-to-one hunch into a 23-city, 50,000-student business. In April 2026, Intrax bought the whole thing.
CL Global Academy
CL Global Academy is an independent international education company that runs academically rigorous, project-based short courses in the heart of Cambridge, UK. Founded in 2009 by Allen Hao and Katrina, it hosts residential programmes inside historic Cambridge colleges - taught by University of Cambridge-affiliated lecturers - covering fields from AI and data science to innovation and entrepreneurship. The Academy welcomes over 1,500 students a year and counts more than 24,000 alumni across 16 years, having grown into a multi-million-dollar business without institutional venture funding.
Inspira Education
Inspira Education is a New York-based edtech company that runs a house of brands connecting students with expert mentors for high-stakes admissions - medical, law, business, and college. Founded in 2020 by Kamir Kothari and Arush Chandna, it pairs applicants with vetted consultants (often former admissions decision-makers) through an AI-enabled matching platform, layering mentorship, essay coaching, interview prep, and test tutoring to improve odds at the world's most competitive programs.
PalmDrive, Inc.
PalmDrive (棕榈大道) is an education-technology company that connects students - mostly Chinese students aiming for top overseas universities - with a network of thousands of mentors who have themselves attended those schools. Founded by Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard alumni in 2013, PalmDrive pairs one-on-one mentorship in admissions, cultural integration, and career planning with an online platform that has drawn a community of more than a million students. The company operates across China and Silicon Valley and has raised over US$10 million in venture funding.
Polygence
Polygence is an online research mentorship platform that pairs ambitious high school students one-on-one with PhD-level mentors from institutions like Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Oxford to design and complete an independent research project over roughly 10 sessions. Founded in 2019 by two Stanford PhDs, Janos Perczel and Jin Chow, it turns curiosity into tangible outcomes - published papers, apps, novels, podcasts - and gives students a distinctive credential for college applications. The company now spans a network of 2,000+ mentors across 40+ fields and runs a biannual Symposium of Rising Scholars where students present their work to a global audience.
Scholarships360
Scholarships360 is a free, data-driven platform that helps students and families find and fund college. Founded by first-generation college students Will and Brian Geiger, it matches students with vetted scholarships, hosts its own $10,000 'No Essay' scholarship, and pairs listings with expert financial aid and admissions advice. The company says over 15 million students have discovered scholarships and colleges through the platform, with more than 5 million matched in 2025 alone.
Kamir Kothari
Kamir Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Inspira Education, an admissions platform pairing students with top-tier consultants for medical, legal, and business school applications. Before starting Inspira in 2020 with Arush Chandna, he held investing and operating roles at Social Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, LendingHome, and The Parthenon Group, after studying finance and economics at Oxford.
Tina Sheng
Tina Sheng is the CEO of PalmDrive USA, the North American arm of PalmDrive, an international education and mentorship company. A Stanford-trained educator who grew up in Beijing, she built her career inside Bay Area high schools as an admissions officer, teacher, and college counselor before founding PalmDrive's undergraduate department in 2015. Under her leadership the team has guided hundreds of students into top-20 universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, and helped grow PalmDrive into a venture-backed company serving thousands of students annually.
Will Geiger
Will Geiger is the cofounder and CEO of Scholarships360, a free platform that helps students find and win scholarships to pay for college. A first-generation college graduate himself, he spent nearly a decade inside the admissions machine - reading more than 10,000 applications as a Senior Assistant Director of Admissions at Kenyon College, running its merit scholarship program, and counseling teenagers through the college maze at Hopkins School - before teaming up with his brother Brian to rebuild the broken scholarship search from scratch. Scholarships360 raised a $250,000 seed round in 2021 and now reaches students nationwide with vetted scholarships and personalized financial aid guidance.
CollegeVine
CollegeVine is a Boston-based education technology company that started as a near-peer mentorship service for college applicants and has grown into an AI platform for higher education. Its free consumer tools - a machine-learning Chancing Engine, school list generator, scholarship finder, and a large student Q&A community - reach millions of high school students, while its newer business is a suite of customizable AI agents (AI Recruiter, AI Advisor, AI Ambassador) that colleges deploy across the student lifecycle to cut administrative costs and raise engagement. The stated goal is to level the playing field in admissions and confront the rising cost of higher education.
Everest Education
Everest Education (E2) is a Ho Chi Minh City-based edtech company founded in 2011 that prepares Vietnamese students from Grade 1 to Grade 12 for international academic environments. Combining its own classroom-management software with in-person learning centers, it offers Math and English enrichment, test preparation, private tutoring, and college-admissions consulting through a blended-learning model. The company has recorded more than 12,000 enrollments and raised roughly $5.4M, including a $4M Series B led by Hendale Capital.
Crimson Education
Crimson Education is a New Zealand-founded edtech company that helps ambitious students win places at the world's most selective universities - the Ivy League, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and beyond. Through a mix of data, AI tools and a global network of roughly 3,000 tutors and former admissions officers, it offers admissions consulting, tutoring, extracurricular mentoring and its own accredited online high school, Crimson Global Academy. Founded in 2013, it became Australasia's first edtech unicorn in November 2024 at a NZ$1 billion valuation.
Embark Corporation
Embark Corporation is a New York-based education technology company that has built online application and admissions software since 1995. Its flagship platform, Embark Campus, runs the full admissions lifecycle - recruiting, applications, review, decisions, enrollment and data integration - for colleges, universities, fellowships and scholarship programs. Embark says its software has powered more than 16 million student applications for institutions including Harvard, NYU, Stanford and the Rhodes and Fulbright fellowships.
Zack Perkins
Zack Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of CollegeVine, the Boston-based platform now deploying AI agents across more than 100 universities to handle recruiting, advising, and alumni outreach. He left Harvard as a sophomore in 2015 to build the company full time, growing it from a peer-advising side project called Admissions Hero into a service with millions of student members. His through-line is stubborn: the kid from a big public high school who never had an admissions officer show up for him now wants to hand that access to everyone.
ZeeMee
ZeeMee is a higher education technology platform that bridges the gap between college-bound students and institutions through authentic community and behavioral intelligence. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, ZeeMee gives students a social space to showcase their personalities beyond transcripts while giving colleges AI-powered insights that predict enrollment intent with up to 98% accuracy. With 2.6M+ active student users, 300+ institutional partners, and a 4.7-star app rating, ZeeMee has quietly become one of the most influential platforms in college enrollment - helping students find roommates, discover campus culture, and connect with admissions teams before ever setting foot on campus.
Vanessa Didyk
Vanessa Roth Didyk is the CEO of ZeeMee, a social platform serving 2.6 million college-bound students across 3,000+ institutions. A serial edtech entrepreneur with 16+ years in the field, she founded Scholar's Station at UC Berkeley, sold it, built a tutoring marketplace at Rev.com, ran MathElf, then took over a struggling ZeeMee in 2018 and turned it into a top-10 App Store social networking app used by roughly 1 in 3 US college freshmen annually.
Shaan Patel
Dr. Shaan Patel is the founder and CEO of Prep Expert, the SAT/ACT prep company that landed a $250,000 deal from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank Season 7 - one of Cuban's most profitable Shark Tank investments. He raised his own SAT score 640 points to a perfect score, then built a company that has helped 100,000+ students improve their scores and win over $100 million in college scholarships. Board-certified dermatologist, Yale MBA, USC MD - Patel turned a personal academic transformation into a $75M+ enterprise.