Top Higher Education Startups in 2024

Since 1995, Embark has been the leading provider of online application and admissions software to colleges, universities, and fellowship programs around the world. To date, we've powered more than 16 million students applications to clients including Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and the Rhodes Scholarships. Our admissions platform is always evolving and we're also creating new solutions to match students with educational opportunities.

Cirkled in is an award-winning, cloud-based, 21st-century recruitment platform matching colleges and universities to high school students based on students’ detailed rich portfolio. Colleges spend over $10 Billion every year on recruitment of High School students with only 1% return. They struggle to meet their enrollment goals and diversity and equity goals. And we know how excruciating and painful the process is for students. Cirkled in is a recruitment platform for colleges to get the holistic view of students’ achievement, strengths, and talents, identify the best-fit candidates for their institution and recruit them. Using proprietary data analytics, Cirkled-in will match colleges with the best-fit candidates. Cirkled in puts every student at the center of the circle, empowers them to showcase themselves in the best possible way and get discovered by colleges. Just like LinkedIn has revolutionized corporate recruiting, Cirkled in will revolutionize the college recruiting!

Our mission at Woolf is to make higher education more accessible and to ensure that it is globally transferable. We’re building a university for a borderless future, helping a network of colleges around the world maintain excellence in their teaching and receive recognition for their programs. woolfuniversity.notion.site/Welcome-to-Woolf-114e108e55a0805a8e7ee5b9c7fbff11

Life is short—do something that matters! We are Academia.edu. Our mission is to accelerate and democratize the world's research, which increases the velocity of scientific discovery and technological progress, which benefits everyone. Who we are We are building the world’s largest network for sharing and finding academic research online. With over 260M registered users and nearly half of the world’s academics using our platform monthly, Academia.edu has a significant global reach. By joining our team, you will have the chance to make a positive and lasting impact on our users around the globe. Our users include researchers, academics, industry professionals, and college students. Our company has over 340,000 paying premium subscribers, which has resulted in positive cash flow. This puts us in a unique position to disrupt the $25 billion academic publishing industry. Our ~100-person team, which includes ~45 Software Engineers, values curiosity, initiative, teamwork, and collaboration. We are passionate about building a great work environment that produces excellent products. Academia has attracted $62 million in investment from leading VC firms, including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Spark Capital, and Tencent. Our work has garnered favorable attention from trade and mainstream media, including UK Times, Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American, and Forbes.

CodePath is a national non-profit that is reprogramming higher education to create the most diverse generation of software engineers, CTOs, and founders. We deliver industry-vetted courses and career support centered on the needs of Black, Latino/a, Indigenous, and low-income students. Our students train with senior engineers, intern at top companies, and rise together to become the tech leaders of tomorrow. Founded in 2017, CodePath has taught over 20,000 students and delivered courses across over 85 universities. We are supported by some of the largest and most well-respected organizations, including Andreessen Horowitz, Blue Meridian Partners, Cognizant Foundation, Comcast, Google, Meta, Salesforce, Walmart, and Workday, among others. We are currently targeted to serve 10,000+ students a year nationwide as of 2023, and are planning to scale up to ~100,000 students a year by 2030.

MPOWER lends to highly-employable domestic & international students at top US campuses who are excluded from traditional banking options. MPOWER builds on best practices set by LendingClub, SoFi, CommonBond, Earnest, Upstart, and others in the mainstream refinancing market, and applies these insights to an unaddressed segment of the population: high-potential international and domestic students at top universities. This segment requires capabilities that are unique to MPOWER: an innovative credit model, university partnerships, and global servicing. Loans are for 10-years at a fixed-rate, and range between $2,000 and $25,000. MPOWER disburses payments directly to the university to cover tuition or university-sponsored housing, meal plans, or health insurance. The loan comes with free personal finance education courses, credit-building tools, and a job placement service for the students.

The Commons XR provides an integrated platform comprising groups, Virtual Reality, managed VR situation and analytics in one product. TCXR is the first VR platform that provides students analytics to better understand themselves, making for improved student academic success. We strive to help our interns understand what it means to be in a SaaS production focused environment, stressing team communications and corporate processes while teaching how to think about integration on an internal customer based requirements and needs basis. Also how to think about incorporating different tools and how that process is evolved. We blend Unity/Data/FullStack/DevOps/SecOps/UX/UI into one integrated group of activity, to foster better understanding of how to work across departmental lines. We generally have 20+ interns a semester across all these areas in order to run a Friday simulated VR experience for our own testing needs. This is the primary reason for the interns. We still expect you to learn your craft and will help you do that. We have had over 100 interns now "graduated" from our experience, undergraduate, graduate and post-matriculated interns. Many now have jobs. You must have availability Friday 9-11 AM PST for the internship, that is the only and prime requirement, when we run our standup and simulated experiences.

NPHub delivers the fastest growing service to help nurse practitioner students graduate on time. Our core service locates and schedules students in required internships known as clinical rotations. Currently, the industry is underserved -- NP students aren't provided enough resources by universities and as a result, thousands of students have their graduation delayed every year. We want to make sure this stops happening.

NNectir is a seed stage VC-backed EdTech company founded by students at UC Santa Barbara with the mission of reinventing how we teach and learn to create the classroom of the future. Our flagship platform, Nectir Chat, is campus-wide communication infrastructure built to create a community in every class. Our newest software, Nectir AI, is conversational AI infrastructure that allows educators to utilize powerful LLMs to create FERPA/COPPA-compliant, customizable AI Assistants that sit within the LMS.

Mantra Health is a digital mental health clinic on a mission to improve access to evidence-based mental healthcare for young adults. Through augmenting high quality clinical services with software and design, we're on a mission to improve the mental health of over 20 million university and college students through partnerships with higher education institutions and health insurance plans.