university-partnerships
(8)
Green Flower Turned Cannabis Confusion Into a College-to-Career Pipeline
The company began by streaming expert cannabis videos. A decade later, its sharper product is a credentialing machine that connects colleges, workers and operators in an industry still writing its rulebook.
Sara Leoni
Sara Leoni is the founder and CEO of Ziplines Education, a Bay Area career accelerator that partners with 30-plus universities to deliver industry-recognized certificate programs in fields like AI, project management, and digital marketing. A former Division I softball player at UNLV and ex-CEO of the $50M course-materials company Rafter, she raised a $6.4M Series A in 2023-2024 to help close the digital skills gap and has helped more than 20,000 adult learners retool their careers. She frames learning as a zipline: intimidating, exhilarating, and continuous, with a clear start and a clear landing.
Podium Education
Podium Education is an Austin-based edtech company that partners with colleges and universities to close the gap between a degree and a first job. Its flagship product, the Global Career Accelerator, is a for-credit, fully online program in which undergraduates of any major work on real projects for companies like Intel, L'Oreal, OpenAI and the GRAMMYs, build in-demand skills in data, marketing and coding, and collaborate with peers from dozens of countries. After acquiring the early-career talent platform Untapped in 2024, Podium now also connects its students directly to employers, turning coursework into a hiring pipeline.
Ziplines Education
Ziplines Education is a San Carlos, California-based career accelerator that partners with universities to deliver flexible, cohort-based online non-credit certificate courses in high-growth fields like AI, project management, digital marketing, business analytics, and Salesforce administration. Founded in 2017 as GreenFig and relaunched as Ziplines Education in 2024 under CEO Sara Leoni, the company blends live instruction, on-demand content, and real-world work simulations to help adult learners close the gap between traditional education and the skills the digital workforce actually demands.
Wellspring International Education
Wellspring International Education is a Colorado-based international student recruiting firm that helps U.S. colleges and universities build a global brand and enroll talented students from around the world. Through a network of 800+ agencies and in-market representatives across 30+ countries, plus its acquired digital platform StudyMe and the American Honors community-college pathway, Wellspring runs the full funnel - from student fairs and application vetting to yield management and enrollment support.
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.
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.
Risepoint
Risepoint (formerly Academic Partnerships) is a U.S.-based online program management (OPM) company that partners with regional, mostly public universities to develop, launch, market, and scale affordable, workforce-focused online degree programs. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas and owned by the Vistria Group, the company provides marketing, enrollment, student support, faculty support, and technology services so that universities can reach working-adult learners at scale. It works with 100+ university partners across the U.S., UK, and Australia and says it has supported hundreds of thousands of students.