student-success
(13)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.