global-education
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Mitch Gordon Put Freshman Year on a Passport
A teaching job in Taiwan became a career in global education. Now Verto Education's co-founder is trying to turn a semester abroad from an elective into the opening chapter of college.
The $18,750 Bet That Your Best Freshman Dorm Is a Foreign City
Verto Education turned the awkward gap between high school and college into a five-city, credit-bearing product. The pitch is seductive; the fine print is where the actual business lives.
Studyportals
Studyportals is a Netherlands-based education platform that helps students discover and compare study programs anywhere in the world. Through nine portals - including Mastersportal, Bachelorsportal, PhDportal and Scholarshipportal - it lists more than 240,000 English-taught programs from over 3,500 institutions across 110+ countries, drawing roughly 50 million student visitors a year. For universities, it turns that global demand data into recruitment, analytics and consulting services, and in 2024 it launched an AI Student Advisor named Sophia, built with AWS, to guide applicants in more than 20 languages.
Darsel
Darsel is an education-technology nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over the messaging apps students already have. Instead of an app or a laptop, students practice curriculum-aligned questions through SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, and an AI-powered chatbot delivers hints, explanations, and personalized practice while auto-grading homework and reporting progress to teachers. Founded by Stanford MBA and MIT alum Abdulhamid Haidar during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Darsel has grown from a spring-break prototype to a platform used across Jordan, India, and Nigeria, reaching hundreds of thousands of students who have answered hundreds of millions of math questions.
Woolf
Woolf is the first global collegiate university built as software: qualified organizations - companies, nonprofits and academic groups - join as member colleges and issue genuinely accredited degrees. Licensed in Malta and carrying European ECTS credits recognized across 50+ countries, Woolf turns accreditation into an API. Its Airlock product lets education providers plug in, benchmark their learning content, and award credits that stand up to regulatory scrutiny. Founded in 2018 by former Oxford philosopher Joshua Broggi, Woolf partners with Saïd Business School (Oxford), Harvard Business Publishing and Udacity to make credible degrees faster, cheaper and portable across borders.
Abdulhamid Haidar
Abdulhamid Haidar is the founder and CEO of Darsel, a nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over text messages. Instead of apps and video that assume reliable Wi-Fi, Darsel runs entirely on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS, using AI-powered adaptive algorithms to tutor students in Jordan, India and Nigeria. Built during the 2020 COVID lockdown by a Syrian-American who grew up in a family of teachers, Darsel has had more than 120,000 students answer over 170 million math questions. Haidar holds degrees from MIT, Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and previously spent three years at McKinsey. His goal: meaningfully reach 100 million students by 2030.
Room to Read
Room to Read is a global nonprofit working to create a world free from illiteracy and gender inequality. Founded in 2000 after a Microsoft executive's trek through Nepal, it partners with communities and governments to build foundational literacy in early grades and to support girls through secondary school with life-skills and mentorship. As of 2024 it reports reaching more than 50 million children across 28 countries.
Jim Garrison
Jim Garrison is the Founder and President of Ubiquity University, a next-generation global learning platform blending academic rigor with consciousness development, social innovation, and transformative education. Born in 1951 in Szechuan Province, China, to Baptist missionary parents, Garrison holds a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge and has spent five decades at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and civilizational transformation - co-founding the Gorbachev Foundation/USA with Mikhail Gorbachev after the Cold War, launching the State of the World Forum, and more recently convening Humanity Rising, a global summit initiative launched in 2020 that has engaged hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide.
Sameer Shariff
Sameer Shariff is the co-founder and CEO of Cambly, a San Francisco-based edtech platform that connects English learners worldwide with native-speaking tutors via on-demand video chat. A Princeton and Stanford-educated engineer who spent five years at Google, Shariff co-founded Cambly in 2012 after a trip to Argentina revealed how dramatically conversation practice accelerates language fluency. After a failed Series A attempt, he drove Cambly to cash-flow positivity without touching raised capital - then raised $60M from Benchmark, Bessemer, and others once the company no longer needed it. Cambly has ranked #1 in app stores across 150 countries and reaches an addressable market of 1.5 billion people seeking English fluency.