Madrid-based StudentFinance, a fintech company focused on helping partner schools and universities financing students’ education, has raised €1.15 million in its seed round of funding led by Seedcamp and Mustard Seed Maze.
Other investors who participated in the round include José Neves (Founder & CEO of Farfetch), Rolf Schrömgens (Founder and CEO of Trivago), Nuno Sebastião (Founder & CEO of Feedzai), Juan Urdiales, Felipe Navio (Co-founder & Co-CEOs of Jobandtalent), and serial entrepreneurs Carlos Oliveira and Will Neale.
Founded in 2019 by the team behind Uniplaces, the largest student housing platform in Europe, StudentFinance helps partner schools and universities finance students’ education to help increase educational opportunity and empower people to access high-impact careers. It's mission is to solve the skills gap and make education affordable and accessible for all through Income Share Agreements (ISAs). The company aims to transform the workforce for the digital economy by investing in the talent of tomorrow.
Issuing a statement on the funding, Mariano Kostelec, Co-founder & CEO of StudentFianance, said,
“We are proud and incredibly excited to have secured such a high caliber of investors, who believe in our mission of making education affordable and accessible, while moving to an outcomes-based model, protecting the downside of the students. It’s an honor to be working with them to scale Income Share Agreements across Europe.”
StudentFinance partners with providers of ‘in-demand’ skills in order to finance their students with Income Share Agreements (ISAs). The ISAs offer a model through which students don’t pay anything upfront, but a percentage of their income after landing a job, but that too only when they make above the minimum income threshold. StudentFinance evaluates students based on their potential to succeed, not only on their current financial situation. The company also partners with some of the best companies to help students launch their new career.
Commenting on the investment, Orson Stadler, partner at Mustard Seed Maze, said,
“Access to education is one of the main drivers of social inequality. Whilst the number of coding bootcamp providers is fast evolving and opening up new career opportunities for some, it is urgent to find innovative solutions to reduce the inequality of access for the many. We are proud to back StudentFinance and its thousands of students, to remove risk from their education investment, and democratize access to these invaluable skills.”
StudentFinance plans to use the newly raised funds to build the technology and data infrastructure to provide partner schools the management and servicing platform to offer Income Share Agreements to their students. The company said that it will support over 500 students in 2020.
Sia Houchangnia, partner at Seedcamp, also commented on the investment saying,
“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 fulfill their full potential.”
StudentFinance is committed to solving one of the modern societies priority needs – the transformation of the workforce into the digital economy.
