We’re thrilled to share that Unibuddy, the peer-to-peer platform that connects prospective university students with current ones, has raised $20M in a Series B round led by Highland Europe, with follow-on investment from Stride.vc.
Unibuddy has been part of the Emerge community since we provided their very first institutional check in 2015 and it’s been quite the journey since.
The startup emerged from co-founder Kimeshan Naidoo’s own experience as an international student arriving at UCL: that the people best placed to tell you what a university is really like are the students already there. Unibuddy embeds that conversation directly into university websites – a prospective student in a village in India or a favela in Brazil can ask a current student at Cambridge what life there is actually like, and dream accordingly.
The Covid-19 pandemic turned that bridge into critical infrastructure. With campuses closed to visitors, usage jumped 190% and revenue nearly quadrupled. Unibuddy now serves around 450 institutions in 35 countries – including more than 80% of UK universities – with close to 1M students helped and 12M messages exchanged. It’s rare to see a UK higher education business gather this much momentum and geographic reach so quickly; rarer still to have the privilege of a front-row seat.
“Choosing where to study is one of the highest-stakes decisions a person makes, and for decades the best information required you to get on-site, which reinforces all sorts of privileges around access and financial capacity. Diego and Kimeshan have opened up opportunities to anyone with a phone. One million students in, they’re just getting started.”
Jan, Emerge
The funding will drive US and Asia-Pacific expansion, triple the engineering team and grow the product suite, with a goal of reaching 10M students by 2025.
Congratulations, Diego, Kimeshan and the whole Unibuddy team. Onwards and upwards!
Featured in Tech.eu
