We are excited to announce we have raised $3.6M to build the world's first agentic operating system for universities to solve the $400 billion college retention crisis.
We're backed by Y Combinator, Pathlight Ventures, Rebel Fund, Transpose Platform, Multimodal, and other leading investors.
Risely is live at R1 schools (University of Arizona), liberal arts colleges (Westmont), and design schools (NewSchool of Architecture and Design).
Our mission is simple: use agentic AI to keep students enrolled and universities' doors open.
The problem we keep seeing
American higher education is in a structural crisis. Colleges are closing at the fastest rate in modern history, enrollment is shrinking nationwide, and tuition revenue cannot keep pace with rising operating costs. The institutions hit hardest are the small private colleges and regional publics that serve first-generation students.
Inside the institutions that remain, students are dropping out before they finish. Every student lost represents tuition revenue the institution never recovers, and the cumulative bill across U.S. higher education is over $400 billion a year. The teams trying to fix this, advisors, enrollment specialists, and advancement officers, are stretched thinner each semester, while the workflow inside their offices has not changed in a decade.
What we're building
Advisor Agent
The Advisor Agent reads across the SIS, LMS, and CRM to keep advisors ahead of their caseload. It flags the students who need attention now, drafts proactive outreach, and turns every conversation into a logged record, so advisors spend their hours in conversation instead of triage.
Enrollment Agent
The Enrollment Agent runs personalized outreach at scale for admissions teams. It surfaces the next right call, drafts every email and follow-up, and turns voice notes from the road into structured pipeline intelligence the team can act on the same day.
Advancement Agent
The Advancement Agent gives gift officers and prospect researchers leverage they have never had. It drafts donor briefs across the full data stack, captures contact reports through intelligent dictation, and surfaces engagement signals from the CRM so the team walks into every meeting prepared.
Risely runs inside the systems institutions already use. We connect to the major SIS, CRM, LMS, and donor intelligence platforms, so the agents have the full picture from day one and the team does not have to change tools to get value.
The Risely impact
At the University of Arizona, our Advisor Agent helped a lean advising team multiply its productive output. In eight weeks, advisors reached 75 percent of their caseload proactively, lifted outreach volume by 32×, cut median time per outreach by 96 percent, and created roughly six FTEs of new capacity without a single new hire.
At NewSchool of Architecture and Design, our Enrollment Agent helped drive a 248 percent year-over-year increase in enrollment. At Westmont College, our Advancement Agent helped a six-person team exceed a $250M campaign goal, compressing hours of donor-brief assembly into minutes of generation and validation.
A note on the team
Risely was founded by Shahryar Abbasi and Sadia Saifuddin.
Shahryar Abbasi (CEO & Co-founder) built Airwallex's Americas business from 0 to 1 and delivered 11x revenue growth as General Manager, and closed over $17M in enterprise deals as Head of Platform Growth at NerdWallet. He has spent 13+ years building businesses from zero and closing seven-figure deals.
Sadia Saifuddin (CPO & Co-founder) spent seven years leading product development for Salesforce's Education Cloud, where she built from scratch the Student Information System that campuses everywhere rely on as their system of record. She also served as a voting Regent on the University of California Board of Regents, and maintains trusted relationships with hundreds of higher-ed CIOs and Provosts.
Beyond the founders, our team brings together edtech founders, college administrators, and former engineers at Amazon and Zoom, to keep our universities open.
We're hiring in Downtown San Francisco
In-person, 5 days a week, founding-level equity.
- Founding Platform Engineering Lead: build the engine that deploys Risely in 4 weeks while competitors take 12 months.
- Forward Deployed Engineer: live inside customer institutions and ship the code that turns a signed contract into live AI.
- Founder's Associate: be the operating system of the company, running internal ops and building the Claude Code agents that automate the rest.
Apply via risely.ai/careers, and we'll be in touch if you're the right fit.