Arvada-based Scholarly Software sees an opportunity in education and recently raised funds to help build its business serving the industry.
Instruction, including faculty salaries and benefits, is the largest expense incurred by public colleges and universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. With public higher education institutions paying up to $13,540 per full-time student to cover faculty expenses, it’s no wonder Scholarly Software wants to simplify administration data and workflows.
“Over the last 30 years or so, costs in higher ed have really ballooned and a big driver of that has been administrative spend,” said Rusty Cowher, CEO and co-founder of Scholarly, adding that an uptick in hiring only accounts for a portion of the increased costs. “... If you don’t have good software to run your workflows and manage data, the only way to deal with it is to brute force it through additional administrators and really manual processes.”
That’s where Scholarly comes in.
The startup works with colleges and universities to build custom human resource and workforce management software that integrates with other platforms.
Scholarly’s software allows admin to streamline and organize faculty hiring data, performance evaluations and tenure processes, sabbaticals and more. It also uses artificial intelligence to import and understand data and unlock functionalities that weren’t previously possible or took too much time to do manually, Cowher said.
“We view ourselves as making both faculties' [and institutions’] lives easier ... [by] reducing the administrative burden on faculty and streamlining workflows and administrative processes for institutions,” Cowher said. “Ultimately, we want to help higher ed run better, run more efficiently.”
The startup, which recently raised a $3 million seed round, is working with Duke University, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Carnegie Mellon University. It hopes to sign with a few Colorado schools in the fall.
The funding was led by Denver-based venture capital firm Range Ventures. Bienville Capital and angel investors also participated.
“Scholarly has an incredible team that is bringing modern technology and AI solutions to the post-secondary education market,” Adam Burrows, Range Ventures’ co-founder and managing director, said in an email. “From my time as an early executive at Guild Education, I know that this market is huge and desperate for more effective, AI-first solutions.”
Scholarly, according to Cowher, has a strong pipeline of potential customers and needed additional capital and team members to scale.
The fresh funding will extend Scholarly’s runway for another two to two-and-a-half years, Cowher said. The bulk of the seed funding will go toward hiring, he said.
The startup has already grown from four employees to nine in the last two months. It primarily hires people in Denver and Seattle with a heavy focus on engineers.
Scholarly began raising capital in April and closed the round in July. To raise capital, Cowher said he had to prove the company had traction, real customers and a pathway to profitability.
“I liken [raising capital] to applying for jobs, where you might get 90 rejections and you get one yes and so assuming it’s a yes that you’re happy about, it’s a great outcome,” he said. “I think like every enterprise startup or the vast majority of startups at our phase, we got a lot of nos as well. I think money is just not as cheap as it was three years ago.”
Scholarly has raised $4 million since its founding in March 2023.
Cowher, who grew up with a family business, became interested in the higher education space because his father-in-law was the provost and dean at the University of Connecticut.
Before launching Scholarly, Cowher worked at Vail Resorts as the vice president of analytics and insights. When explaining the data automation work he was doing at Vail, Cowher’s father-in-law asked if he could do something like that for colleges and universities.
“Higher ed often suffers from software that’s 10 to 15 years behind the private sector,” Cowher said. “... There’s been a lot of investment in the student side on software and tools [and] for great reason, obviously. On the flip side, there’s been a lot less on the faculty side.”
Realizing standard HR platforms weren’t offering what university faculty and administration needed led Cowher and his co-founder Kelly Sutton to launch Scholarly.
Sutton, who also serves as Scholarly’s chief technology officer, was a senior staff software engineer at payroll and HR company Gusto.
