EdVisorly raises $13.3 million to automate college transfer work

EdVisorly has raised $13.3 million in Series A funding, giving the Los Angeles education technology startup fresh capital to expand software that helps colleges process transfer students. For investors watching private markets, the round stands out because education startups are raising far less venture money than they did during the pandemic boom, according to Crunchbase data.

The company told Crunchbase News that Breachway Capital led the financing. U.S. News & World Report, Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Foundation, Motley Fool Ventures, Juvo Ventures, Zeal Capital Partners and other investors also participated.

EdVisorly CEO Manny Smith said the round brings the company’s total funding to about $22 million and represents a meaningful valuation increase from prior fundraises. A Series A is an early institutional funding round that companies typically use to expand teams, improve products and sign more customers.

What EdVisorly is trying to fix

EdVisorly builds software for the college admissions and transfer process, with a focus on the administrative work that happens before and after a student applies. The company says its platform does not decide who gets admitted. Smith told Crunchbase News it is meant to automate repetitive tasks that can slow university staff, such as reading transcripts and recalculating grade-point averages under each school’s rules.

The company’s proprietary platform, EddyAI, reads a student’s transcript, extracts course data and compares it with a university’s credit equivalency rules. Credit equivalency rules determine whether a class taken at one institution counts toward a requirement at another.

Students can upload transcripts for an unofficial credit review before speaking with an admissions counselor, according to the company. The platform then shows how classes may transfer, what the degree may cost and how many semesters could remain. On the university side, registrars use the software to process official transfer credits and create new credit-matching rules without manually reviewing every course.

Smith told Crunchbase News that the next version of the product will focus on organizing transfer-credit data so students have less uncertainty about whether prior coursework will count.

A founder shaped by the transfer problem

Smith’s interest in college access grew out of his own path. He told Crunchbase News that, as a high school senior, college did not seem realistic because his parents had no college credits, his family could not afford tuition and he did not know how to apply. A sports scholarship later helped him attend the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Smith spent eight years on active duty, including work as a technical product manager building satellites and software for national defense for the Air Force and Space Force. After a seven-month deployment, he studied data on community college students transferring to four-year universities and concluded that the odds of earning a bachelor’s degree through that route were too low.

He launched EdVisorly in 2019 while earning an MBA at the University of California, Berkeley.

Growth in a slower edtech market

EdVisorly says more than 100 colleges, universities and higher education systems use its software, including Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The company says it has helped more than 250,000 students since launch.

The startup sells subscriptions directly to higher education institutions, a model often called business-to-business, or B2B, because the customer is an organization rather than an individual consumer. EdVisorly currently has nearly 50 employees, according to the company.

The new funding will go toward the company’s core engineering infrastructure and more user-experience designers for the student-facing app, according to Crunchbase News. User experience design, often shortened to UX, refers to how easy and clear a product is for people to use.

The round comes while edtech funding remains well below its pandemic-era peak. Crunchbase data shows education-related startups raised nearly $20 billion globally in 2021. In the first half of 2026, those startups raised just under $1.8 billion, down from $2.5 billion in the first half of 2025 but above the $1.4 billion raised in the second half of 2025.

Jason Krantz, managing partner and founder at Breachway Capital, told Crunchbase News by email that EdVisorly’s appeal is its impact on both institutions and students. He said the company creates efficiency for schools while improving the experience for students making major education decisions.

This story draws on original reporting from Crunchbase News.