student-success
(30)
Campus bets that the cheapest dropout is the one who stays
An online college backed by tech investors is putting money into the decidedly human business of finishing school. Its wager: live professors, persistent coaches and fewer financial surprises can make an associate degree worth starting.
Mentor Collective and the art of starting before September
A mentor is useful only if the conversation begins. Mentor Collective helps colleges turn introductions into relationships - and relationships into clues about what students need.
Enflux found the student hidden in the spreadsheet
Health professions schools collect mountains of evidence. Enflux connects the pieces, so faculty can spot trouble sooner and spend less time preparing to help.
Lisa Ryerson Is Teaching a University to Listen
A first-generation college student became a middle-school teacher, then learned to lead at two very different scales. At SNHU, Lisa Marsh Ryerson is betting that a university with more than 200,000 learners can still hear one voice at a time.
Patrick Garayta Is Betting That College’s Missing Infrastructure Is a Relationship
After two decades selling the machinery of education, Patrick Garayta has taken charge of a company built around something stubbornly human: making sure a student has someone to ask.
Alex Pritchett and the $600 Yes That Became Upswing
Before the funding rounds and hundreds of thousands of students, there was a spare room, a fragile nine-dollar web host and one small contract. Alex Pritchett helped turn that precarious beginning into a durable student-support company.
Melissa Pippine Built a Marketing Career by Listening Before Speaking
Before she became Watermark’s chief marketing officer, Melissa Pippine spent years close to products, customers and the untidy systems between them. Her career makes a quiet argument: good marketing begins long before the campaign.
Watermark Bought the Campus Back Office. Now It Wants to Make the Data Talk.
Watermark assembled six familiar higher-ed tools into one suite used by more than 1,500 institutions. The bet now is that connected data - not another dashboard - can turn accreditation paperwork into decisions people make before the deadline.
Ad Astra Found $500,000 Hiding in a College Timetable
A course schedule looks like clerical plumbing. Ad Astra argues it is where colleges quietly decide who graduates, which rooms sit empty and how much tuition slips away.
The College CRM That Decided Chatbots Weren’t Doing Enough
Element451 started with an application form. A decade later, it is betting that colleges do not need another dashboard - they need agents that can chase a missing document, answer at midnight and notice when a student goes quiet.
Melvin Hines Built a Company Around the Students Higher Ed Forgets
Only 68 students from his high-school class of 250 reached graduation. Hines turned that number into a 13-year operating thesis: support should arrive before a student has to ask.
A Five-Year-Old University Is Trying to Make the Business Degree Prove Itself
International Business University has gone from 11 graduates to nearly 700 in two years. Its wager is simple: a young school can earn trust faster if every course leaves evidence an employer can understand.
Embark’s Big Bet: Make the RESP Boring Enough for Busy Parents
A 61-year-old scholarship-plan institution has rebuilt itself as a digital education-savings utility. The convenience is real - and so is the price of outsourcing the paperwork.
The Startup That Texts College Dropouts Before They Drop Out
Melvin Hines was one of 68 kids in his high school class to graduate. He built Upswing so the other students - the adult learners, the first-gen, the ones nobody texts back - get a fair shot at the finish line.
The Survey That Grew Up: How a Yale Dorm Project Reads 15 Million Kids
It began as a way to ask students what they thought of school. A decade and $105 million later, Panorama reads the data of 15 million American kids - and now wants its AI to write the next move.
A Minnesota College Made Curiosity a Spectator Sport
Gustavus is small by design, but its ambitions spill well beyond the classroom. The wager is that close mentorship, a guaranteed real-world experience, and one unusually public science conference can make a 1,900-student college feel larger than its headcount.
The Company Behind the College Journey You Never Knew Had a Control Room
EAB has spent years turning the messy machinery of education into a connected business: part research desk, part software suite, part enrollment agency. Its real product is a wider field of view - from the first college search to the first job simulation.
Knack
Knack is a student success technology company that helps colleges and universities run and scale peer-tutoring programs. Its platform recruits, trains, and pays high-achieving students to tutor their classmates through web and mobile apps and a real-time online classroom, giving institutions a measurable way to improve retention and graduation while creating paid campus jobs. Founded in 2015 and now serving hundreds of campuses including the University of Florida, Georgia Tech, Northeastern, Fordham, and Auburn, Knack raised a Series B in October 2025 and appointed higher-ed veteran Megan Dusenbery as CEO.
Mantra Health
Mantra Health is a New York-based digital mental health company that partners with colleges and universities to give students access to a full spectrum of care - from self-guided wellness content and coaching to therapy, psychiatry, and 24/7 crisis support. Its 'Whole Campus Care' model integrates with existing campus counseling centers to close gaps in access, reduce wait times, and help students stay enrolled and succeed.
Katie Fang
Katie Fang is the founder and CEO of SchooLinks, an Austin-based education technology company whose college and career readiness platform serves millions of K-12 students across U.S. school districts. Born in Shanghai and educated across four countries, she taught herself to code and built the first version of the product with $5,000 in savings, then grew it from a student-facing app into an enterprise SaaS platform that school districts use to track and improve student outcomes. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, she has taken SchooLinks onto the Inc. 5000 list three years running and raised roughly $90 million in venture funding through a 2024 Series B.
Filadd
Filadd is a Córdoba, Argentina-based edtech company (Y Combinator S21) that helps Latin American students pass college entrance exams and graduate from university. Its platform blends video lessons, live tutoring, AI-powered study plans, and downloadable resources to prepare students for regional exams like Chile's PAES and Brazil's ENEM. Filadd serves more than 25,000 students a year across Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia.
Megan Dusenbery
Megan Dusenbery is the Chief Executive Officer of Knack, a student success platform that helps colleges run paid peer tutoring programs. Appointed in October 2025 alongside the company's Series B led by New Markets Venture Partners, she succeeded founder Samyr Qureshi, who moved to executive chairman. She spent nearly two decades building higher-ed partnerships at Kaplan (rising to Senior Vice President of Higher Education) and at ACUE, where she was Chief Partnerships Officer before taking the Knack job.
Analytikus
Analytikus is a Miami-based education-technology company that applies machine learning and artificial intelligence to help colleges and universities reduce student dropout, sharpen recruitment, and personalize teaching. Its SEAL platform pulls signals from learning management systems and campus data into a holistic student profile (WHALE), then layers on predictive modules and generative-AI assistants - Emilia and Socrates - to give students 24/7 support and give faculty an early-warning read on who is at risk.
Axio Education
Axio Education is an AI-native learning platform, spun out of Arizona State University's Luminosity Lab in 2023, that helps colleges and universities design, deliver, and improve courses. It combines LMS, CRM, and SIS capabilities with agentic AI to compress course development from months to minutes, deliver personalized learning pathways, and give faculty real-time insight into how students are doing - while keeping instructors in creative control.
Northeastern University
Northeastern University is a private research university founded in 1898 in Boston, best known for pioneering large-scale cooperative education (co-op), where students alternate semesters of classroom study with paid, full-time professional work. Under president Joseph E. Aoun, it has grown into a 13-campus global system spanning the U.S., Canada and the U.K., enrolling roughly 38,000 students and earning R1 doctoral research status. Its model fuses experiential learning, industry partnership and applied research in fields from AI to network science.
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.
Miguel Cosculluela
Miguel Molina Cosculluela is the founder and CEO of Analytikus, a Miami-based EdTech company that uses learning analytics and AI to help colleges and universities boost student success, retention and personalized teaching. A self-described analytics evangelist with 12+ years in the field, he co-founded a Startup Weekend winner in Geneva, has appeared on CNN to talk advanced analytics, and hosts the bilingual podcast Simplifying Analytics. He is also an Ironman 70.3 finisher and genealogy aficionado.
Handshake
Handshake is a San Francisco company that began as the career network for Gen Z, connecting tens of millions of students and recent grads with employers and university career centers. Built by three Michigan Tech computer science students to give kids from non-elite schools a fair shot at good jobs, it grew into the dominant early-career recruiting platform. In January 2025 it launched Handshake AI, turning its network of students, PhDs and domain experts into a human data-labeling marketplace that supplies high-quality training data to frontier AI labs - a pivot that has grown into a roughly $1B annualized gross revenue business.
Sabih Wasi
Sabih Bin Wasi is the Founder and CEO of Stellic, a degree management platform born from a personal spreadsheet he built as a confused freshman at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Growing up in Karachi as the son of a teacher and a civil engineer, he came to CMU-Q with transfer credits, a head full of course prerequisites, and a stubborn conviction that the system could be better. He co-founded Stellic with his wife Rukhsar Neyaz and fellow CMU-Q alum Musab Popatia, turning a student project into enterprise software now used by 80+ universities and over one million students. Stellic has raised $14.1 million in total funding, earned a Forbes 30 Under 30 Education nod in 2019, received a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant, and has never lost a university partner in five years of operation.
Stellic
Stellic is a centralized degree-progression platform used by universities to handle degree audits, academic advising, planning, registration, and analytics. Founded by Carnegie Mellon undergrads who hated the experience of mapping their own degrees, it now serves 80+ institutions and over a million students across the world.