The stellar team behind Uniplaces – the largest student housing platform in Europe who raised over $30m from the likes of Atomico and Octopus – is back with their newest venture, StudentFinance.
With lessons learned from building Uniplaces and targeting the student market, cofounders Mariano, Marta, Sergio and Miguel are moving into the financial services space with StudentFinance to help solve the skills gap, while transforming the trillion-dollar education industry.
We’re thrilled to invest in their seed round alongside MustardSeed Impact Fund and some of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs including Jose Neves (founder & CEO of Farfetch), Rolf Schromgens (founder & CEO of Trivago), Nuno Sebastiao (founder & CEO of Feedzai), Juan Urdiales and Felipe Navio (co-founders & co-CEOs of Jobandtalent).
There are over 1m unfilled vacancies for technology roles in the USA alone, with another 700k in Europe, making the need for training people for these jobs more important than ever. StudentFinance partners with education providers focused on high-demanded skills, to finance their students’ education through Income-Share-Agreements (“ISAs”), a model through which students don’t pay anything upfront to access an education programme, and pay a percentage of their income after getting a job and earning above a minimum amount. The company also works with a large network of employers to map the talent needs in the market and further de-risk the model by ensuring high placement rates.
The company’s predictive model technology creates an intelligence layer between talent, education programmes and employers, to bring transparency and maximize employment outcomes. The model analyses in real-time job market data and defines the priority fields of study and skills. StudentFinance then analyses and selects programs teaching those skills by the quality of the curriculum and employability outcomes. Students, in turn, are assessed based on their future potential, and not based on past income or employment history, without the need for a co-signer or guarantor.
Mariano Kostelec, co-founder & CEO of StudentFinance, comments: “We are proud and incredibly excited to have secured such a high calibre of investors, who believe in our mission of making education affordable and accessible while moving to an outcomes-based model. It’s an honour to be working with them to scale Income Share Agreements across Europe”.
On the investment our Partner, Sia Houchangnia, comments: “At Seedcamp, we’ve been closely following the emergence of ISAs as a mechanism to facilitate access to education while aligning all parties’ interests. With StudentFinance, we believe we’ve now found the right team to build the European category leader in this space. Mariano, Marta, Sergio and Miguel bring a lot of entrepreneurial experience as well as highly complementary skill sets and we are extremely excited to back them on their mission to enable millions of Europeans to fulfil their full potential.”
The funding will be used to build the technology and data infrastructure to provide partner schools the Management and Servicing Platform to offer Income Share Agreements to their students.
For more information visit studentfinance.com