INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Two years ago, dormmates Justin Wenig and Nicholas Diao struggled to get into a popular computer science class at Columbia University
The duo eventually got into that class, but after the initial frustration around class scheduling, they decided &it was an obvious problem
for a computer to solve.
Wenig and Diao are the founders of Coursedog, a software startup that wants to create an operating system for
universities to better schedule classes, professors and sections based on demand and interest
&Think of it,& Wenig said, &as a Superhuman for class scheduling systems.
Today, Coursedog announced it has raised $4.2 million from a crop
of investors, including First Round Josh Kopelman
The company did not disclose any other investors, and there were no board seats taken on during the financing round
The Y Combinator graduate total known venture capital funding is now $5.7 million
Investors in the company include FoundersX Venture, EFund and Jinal Jhaveri, the former CEO of SchoolMint, a school enrollment startup.
The
funding will be used to build out Coursedog product line on projecting course demand, the correct number of seats a school should offer per
course and student success.
A lot of people think higher [education] is a slow institution, but institutions are really thinking about how
to promote student success,& Wenig said in an interview with TechCrunch
But instead of adopting any technology, universities are careful about sharing protected data, he continued.
Competition-wise, Wenig said
that Blackboard, a learning management startup, continues to be one of the two &big software tools within universities.& Coursedog sits on
top of the other software tool: the student information system, used by administrators that need to plan student schedules.
After Wenig and
Diao cold-called hundreds of colleges, Columbia Law School was the first contract signed
Since then, the startup has landed deals with more than 60 colleges and universities of all sizes.
Coursedog clientele fits a range
The smallest client, per Wenig, is the Laguna School of Art and Design, which has roughly 600 students
Wenig also noted they cater to a mix of public and private schools, with public schools often &being the most innovative.
A lot of states
offer incentive-based funding,& Wenig said
&In Utah, the amount of funds you might get from the state as a public institution is directly proportional to how well you&re using your
space on campus.& He claims that Coursedog helps improve graduation rates by getting more students into the right classes.
Today, we are
just building apps on top of the Student Information System to help schools with scheduling, curriculum planning and catalog publishing and
are slowly eating away functionality that schools would normally be doing with spreadsheets and native to the SIS,& he noted.
Coursedog
plans to scale to 100 more universities in the next year, and will use the new funding to help &grow up& its production.
