Stellic, a centralized degree progression platform designed to help students conquer the challenges of the modern university experience, has raised $11 million in a Series A funding round led by Reach Capital, along with 15 EdTech founder-investors like John Katzman (2U/Noodle), David Blake (Degreed), Matt Pittinsky (Blackboard), and Dan Carroll (Clever).
Founded in 2016, the Stellic story starts with students. While attending Carnegie Mellon University, co-founders Sabih Bin Wasi, Rukhsar Neyaz, and Musab Popatia were confused and overwhelmed with their lack of visibility and access to tools that would help them navigate the many degree requirements – curricular and non-curricular – and options available to them to maximize their experience as students. Sabih Bin Wasi digitized the extensive course catalog himself into a planner and landed on what would become a holistic, end-to-end platform for degree progression that now benefits more than 300 thousand other students like himself.
Stellic’s easy-to-navigate advising, degree audit, degree planning, and analytics tools can be utilized by students, advisors, and administrators to ensure students stay on track and receive the personalized educational experience they deserve. More than 45 colleges and universities now use Stellic to promote student agency over the individual college experience and return precious time to administrators in order to better scale personalized support systems.
Commenting on the development, Sabih Bin Wasi, Co-Founder & CEO of Stellic, said,
“In my view, part of this accelerated growth is due to the critical changes higher ed is going through right now. With declining high school enrollment numbers, student retention has become the top priority for nearly every university and college. Student satisfaction is at an all-time low, particularly with the campus technology and advising support. Like many things, COVID surfaced these issues even further.
With this funding, I am so excited for what happens next: intentional growth of Stellic’s partner community and the technology platform. We plan to invest in building a community of partners for each stakeholder – academic leadership, registrars, advising groups and most importantly students.”
Stellic plans to use the new funds to grow its team and community of institutional partners, as well as enhance the student-centric capabilities in the platform to reach new critical touchpoints of the student journey.
Jennifer Carolan, Founder & Partner at Reach Capital, said,
“Stellic’s beautiful planning, scheduling, and advising features are so intuitive they could only have been created by students solving for their own needs. We are thrilled to back this team out of CMU, bringing cutting-edge technology to the college degree planning experience.”
The investment comes on the heels of unprecedented turbulence in higher education where student engagement is critical. By equipping students with more visibility into their degree pathway options, they can practice more agency over their degree plans and prepare for more meaningful interactions with their advisors to talk about other areas of life and logistics that might be getting in the way of progress.
