When Manny Smith was a high school senior, attending college didn’t look like an option. His parents had no college credits, the family couldn’t afford tuition, and he didn’t know how to apply. His path only changed during his second semester of high school, when a sports scholarship landed him a spot at the U.S. Air Force Academy — an acceptance that transformed him from a teenager with no money for college into a military officer.
Smith spent eight years on active duty, serving as a technical product manager building satellite software for national defense for the Air Force and Space Force. When he returned home from a seven-month deployment, Smith looked at the data surrounding community college transfers to four-year universities and realized how low the success rates were.
“You have a higher chance of success [of attaining a bachelor’s degree] by pursuing a military academy … than if you go to any community college …,” Smith said in an interview with Crunchbase News. “That didn’t really make sense to me.”
He then entered graduate school and launched EdVisorly in 2019 while working on his MBA at UC Berkeley.
Now, the Los Angeles-based startup tells Crunchbase News exclusively that it has secured a $13.3 million Series A funding round to scale its AI-native platform, which automates the manual back-office workflows that can slow down university admissions.
Breachway Capital led the financing, which included participation from U.S. News & World Report, Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Foundation, Motley Fool Ventures, Juvo Ventures, Zeal Capital Partners, and others.
The new capital brings EdVisorly’s total funding to about $22 million and marks a significant valuation step-up from its previous tranches, according to CEO Smith.
The startup’s funding comes amid an overall downturn in investment in the sector. Venture funding to education-related companies has in recent years come in at a fraction of the sums such startups raised during the pandemic peak, when investment topped out at nearly $20 billion in 2021. Through the first half of 2026, however, edtech and education-related startups have raised just under $1.8 billion globally, per Crunchbase data. That’s below the $2.5 billion raised in the first half of last year, but a notch higher than the $1.4 billion raised in the second half of 2025.
Automating the back office
EdVisorly aims to take the slow, manual paperwork out of the college admissions and transfer process.
The software doesn’t decide which students get accepted and does not serve as a gatekeeper, Smith emphasized. Instead, he said, it is designed to handle the tedious, behind-the-scenes administrative tasks that bog down university staff.
The driver behind EdVisorly’s recent growth is its proprietary platform, Eddie AI. The tool works to automate repetitive back-office workflows in the admissions and enrollment process, including tasks such as reading student transcripts and recalculating GPAs based on a university’s specific criteria.
“We automate a lot of the backend processes,” Smith said.
For the 10.5 million community college students in the U.S. trying to transfer to a four-year university, the process is usually a total guessing game. EdVisorly aims to bridge that gap.
Applicants are able to upload their transcripts into its platform to run an unofficial credit evaluation. The app automatically reads their classes and matches them against university requirements. Even before they ever speak to an admissions counselor, families can leaern exactly how their credits stack up, what a degree will cost, and how many semesters a student would have remaining.
On the university side, registrars use the same technology to process official transfer credits and quickly build new credit-matching rules, bypassing a process that historically required a human to review every course.
“The technology actually reads the transcript, it takes that data from the transcript, and it compares it to the equivalencies that the school has,” Smith noted. “There’s kind of an infinite number of … transferable credits and courses that could exist across the United States.”
The startup’s next iteration will focus on organizing all of that data, “so that there’s no mystery as to whether a student’s credits will transfer,” Smith said.
Both sides of the market
EdVisorly counts more than 100 colleges, universities and higher education systems as customers. Its roster includes institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. It has helped over 250,000 students since its inception, per the company.
The startup sells directly to higher education institutions via a B2B subscription model. Smith uses a management framework from his military days to run deployments: People come first, clear policies come second, and technology sits at the bottom as a tool to support them.
“We believe in not the concept of replacement, but truly repurposed,” Smith said. “Technology can best be implemented when you have people who are willing to adopt, and they’re innovative, and they’re excited.”
Its Series A funding will go toward upgrading the platform’s core engineering infrastructure and adding more UX designers to polish the student-facing app. Currently, the company has nearly 50 employees.
Jason Krantz, managing partner and founder at Breachway Capital, said he is most excited about EdVisorly’s “breadth of impact.”
“This is not a solution that optimizes for one side of the market at the expense of another,” he wrote via email. “It drives real efficiency and tangible value for institutions while delivering a meaningfully better experience for students navigating one of the most important decisions of their lives. That is a truly unique value proposition.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
