Alumni startup raises $11 million in Series A funding

The startup Stellic was created by Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar alumni Sabih Bin Wasi, Rukhsar Neyaz, and Musab Popatia. The company began as a student project at CMU-Q, a Qatar Foundation partner university, and is now based in San Francisco with employees all over the world. All three are computer science graduates, with Bin Wasi and Neyaz completing their studies in 2015 and Popatia in 2016.

Published as “Student-built degree progression platform raises $11 Million to empower students and solve higher education’s major challenge” in PRNewswire, March 22, 2022

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.