Excelerate 2010 graduate ScholarPRO launched nationwide today and was featured on Portfolio.com and TechCrunch. The startup, which simplifies the scholarship search and application process, is based in New York City and has raised nearly $1 million in seed funding from Sandbox and other angel investors.
Read an excerpt from the Portfolio piece below:
“One of the first companies to emerge from Chicago’s Excelerate Labs incubator in 2010 is going national today with a mission to simplify the labyrinthine process for hunting scholarship money.
“ScholarPRO, now based in New York City, with a seed funding round of just shy of $1 million under its belt from Sandbox Industries and several angel investors, had been offering its services to students from California prior to today.
“‘We’re really excited about bringing this to market,’ Francis Kim, CEO and cofounder of ScholarPRO, told Portfolio.com Monday. ‘It’s a real pain point for parents and students.’”
“Kim, a 35-year-old who worked at LimeWire and ProfitLogic before starting his own company, refused to disclose exactly how much money ScholarPRO has raised, but characterized it as a small early round of funding.”
Read the full article here.
TechCrunch also covered the launch; read an excerpt below:
“Chicago-based ScholarPro is launching today as an intelligent matching system for students and educational scholarships. Designed to ease the search and application process, ScholarPro’s adaptive matching engine promises to deliver smarter, targeted lists of scholarships. It aims to fix the current dated process that require students to navigate complex application processes and then fail to deliver relevant results.
“On the site, you answer a few simple adaptive questions, such as where you are from, etc. and the platform will match you to scholarships that fit your needs. You can actually apply for the scholarships directly from ScholarPro.
“As founder Francis Kim explains, the startup’s matching engine is actually built on the adaptive quiz and aims to strictly qualify student for scholarships so results are opportunities students actually qualify for.”
Read the full feature here.