Coursedog, a Software-as-a-Service startup for higher education, has raised $4.2 million from a group of investors, including existing investor Josh Kopelman, venture capitalist and founder of First Round Capital, to make class programming smarter.
While Coursedog did not disclose any other investors, the latest financing round has taken the company’s total raised amount to $5.7 million.
Founded in 2017 by two Columbia University Computer Science students, Justin Wenig and Nicholas Diao, Coursedog eliminates the manual work in class scheduling for universities and higher education institutions. Realizing there is massive pain involved in class schedule planning, the duo ventured out to create an operating system for universities to better program classes, teachers and sections based on demand and interest. In August 2017, the startup launched Class Schedule Planning Software for higher education. Today, it partnered with various universities, including Columbia Law School, State University of New York (SUNY), Brigham Young University (BYU), University of Montana, among others.
Coursedog recognizes itself as a Modern Planning Software for Higher Education with the mission to improve lives for students and administrators. It provides simple Schedule planning, Curriculum and Catalog planning solutions, helping university leaders save time and money while accelerating student success.
Explaining about the company, co-founder Justin Wenig said, “Today, we are only creating applications on the Student Information System (SIS) to help schools with programming, curriculum planning and catalog publishing, and we are slowly consuming the functionality that schools would normally do with spreadsheets and native of the SIS.”
Coursedog’s schedule planning software helps universities and colleges build the perfect section, room and exam schedule, and also helps minimize manual work to schedule events from start to finish and improve student experience. Its curriculum planning software enables universities to automate curriculum approval workflows and send approved proposals directly into their SIS and the catalog. And, its catalog planning software helps them build the perfect catalog with guaranteed data integrity.
The company claims to be one of the top software tools within universities. It claims to help improve graduation rates by attracting more students to the right classes. Since its inception, Coursedog has reached agreements with more than 60 colleges and universities of all sizes. It plans to expand to 100 universities in the coming year.
Meanwhile, the company plans to use the newly raised funds to develop its product line in the projection of course demand, the correct number of seats a school should offer per course and student success.
