SAN FRANCISCO, March 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Stellic today announced $11 million in funding led by Reach Capital, a U.S. based impact fund focused on equitable education. 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 from Karachi, Pakistan. While attending Carnegie Mellon University as international students, co-founders Sabih Bin Wasi, Musab Popatia and Rukhsar Neyaz 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 recent Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and 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. Today, half the company is based out of Karachi, Pakistan and the predominantly engineering-based team represents more than a dozen alumni from Habib University, a current partner of Stellic that utilizes the platform for its own students and administration.
“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, Reach Capital Founder and Partner. “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 globally 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.”
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, Founder and CEO 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.”
“I am incredibly proud of the team we have been able to build in Pakistan, and impressed with the promise shown by our local talent,” said Musab Popatia, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Stellic. “And I sincerely hope that our success can inspire more students to give entrepreneurship a fair shot.”
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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