SAN FRANCISCO,
March 22, 2022
/PRNewswire/ -- Stellic today announced $11 million in funding led by Reach Capital, an
impact fund focused on equitable education, along with 15 edtech
founder-investors like John Katzman
(2U/Noodle), David Blake (Degreed),
Matt Pittinsky (Blackboard), and
Dan Carroll (Clever). 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.
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, a rising junior at the time,
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 beautiful planning, scheduling and advising features
are so intuitive they could only have been created by students
solving for their own needs," said Jennifer
Carolan, Founder and Partner at Reach Capital. "We are
thrilled to back this team out of CMU, bringing cutting edge
technology to the college degree planning experience."
The investment arrives on the heels of unprecedented turbulence
to higher education where student engagement is critical. This past
year has seen a rise of institutional initiatives shifting from
reactive to proactive advising approaches in order to scale
personalized attention to students adjusting to hybrid remote
learning environments. 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.
"Students have seen major benefits with Stellic, which is now
available to all undergraduates and an increasing number of
graduate students," said John
Papinchak, Registrar at Carnegie Mellon
University. "To date, over 90% of students have adopted the
platform to plan for future semesters, and adoption rates continue
to grow. With Stellic, CMU students are more engaged in their
degree plan and confident in their decision making leading to
graduation."
Institutions are building upon the insights afforded by active
student usage to improve operational effectiveness around course
demand and velocity to degree completion. "The piece that most
excited me in lots of ways about Stellic is that it was built by
students for students," said Elizabeth
Adams, Associate Vice President of Undergraduate Studies at
California State University,
Northridge. "To me that meant it was going to be something
that was more engaging and we could use the student-centric
planning and scheduling to forecast course demand. We were also
doing '15-to-Finish' which was helping students move to the degree,
but wasn't moving them necessarily more quickly. I realized that
often they weren't looking down the road; they were looking to the
next semester and we weren't giving them the tools they needed to
be able to figure out how to graduate more quickly."
Stellic plans to dedicate the new funds to growing the Stellic
team and community of institutional partners, as well as enhancing
the student-centric capabilities in the platform to reach new
critical touchpoints of the student journey.
"In my view, part of this accelerated growth is due to the
critical changes higher ed is going through right now," said
Sabih Bin Wasi, CEO and Co-Founder
of Stellic. "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."
Click here to read more from Sabih
Bin Wasi on what this fundraise means to the Stellic
community.
About Reach Capital
Reach Capital is committed to
empowering learners and educators from early childhood education to
professional development and everything in between. Their
investments inspire people to reach their full potential through
the transformative power of education. Reach is on a mission to
seed the most inspirational, uplifting and engaging educational
tools which help educators and families realize children's full
potential.
About Stellic
Stellic is a centralized degree
progression platform designed to help students conquer the
challenges of the modern university experience. 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.
To learn more about Stellic, please visit www.stellic.com.
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SOURCE Stellic