Startup Deep Dive : iSchoolConnect — it sold its pandemic side project to Turnitin, then went back to a market it’s underfunded for

iSchoolConnect has raised, by its own most complete public account, well under $2 million in equity funding across its lifetime. In the same period, the AI it built to survive one crisis was good enough that a Nasdaq-adjacent assessment giant bought it outright.

That is the contradiction sitting at the centre of this Mumbai-and-Massachusetts study-abroad platform: a company too small to appear in most Indian edtech funding tables, whose remote exam-proctoring technology quietly handled more than three million exams during the pandemic before being sold to ExamSoft, part of the Turnitin family, in June 2021. It then went back to the much harder, much less glamorous business it started in — getting students into foreign universities — right as the market it depends on, US student visas for Indians, started to come apart.

Quick facts

What they do

iSchoolConnect sells two related things to two different buyers. To students, mostly in Asia and headed to the US, Canada, the UK or Australia, it sells a single application platform: one profile, AI-driven shortlisting of degree programmes, and tools such as an essay and document grader, a video interview analyser and an SOP mentor that are meant to replace some of what a human admissions consultant does. To universities and colleges, it sells the same underlying AI as enterprise software — a way to run “international enrolment management,” from screening applicants’ documents to running conversational chatbots for prospective students. The company describes itself as trying to make university admissions “hassle-free” for students while helping institutions modernise how they recruit internationally (iSchoolConnect, About Us).

The origin

Ashish Fernando’s route to founding iSchoolConnect ran through his own bad experience as an applicant. In 2009, he left a biotechnology track in India to pursue a master’s in the US, convinced that American technology and biotech innovation were where he needed to be. Even after paying educational consultants, he found the process itself — comparing programmes, managing standardised tests, arranging financing, and getting a student visa — confusing and slow (YourStory, August 2019).

He worked it out anyway: a software engineering job at Thomson Reuters in 2009, programme-management roles at HCL Technologies’ R&D wing in India, and then, in 2015, a move into the AI startup Quantiphi, where he ran the data science and engineering business. He also completed an MBA at Bentley University in Massachusetts. It was only after that degree, looking back at how hard his own search had been, that he decided to build “a bias-free machine learning-driven model” to match students to programmes in minutes rather than months (YourStory, August 2019). He co-founded iSchoolConnect in 2017 with an MBA classmate, Don Kphury, who left the company early “to pursue other responsibilities,” leaving Fernando to run it alone (YourStory, August 2019). Corporate filings for the company’s Indian arm, iSchoolConnect Technologies Private Limited, later listed Quantiphi-linked director Vivek Vijay Khemani among its directors — a thread back to the AI startup where Fernando spent his last job before founding his own (ZaubaCorp, MCA filing data).

The struggle years

iSchoolConnect’s core business is built on something that can be switched off overnight: cross-border student mobility. That is more or less what happened in 2020. When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down international travel, visa processing and, for a while, university campuses themselves, a platform whose entire premise was getting students onto foreign campuses lost the ground it stood on. Public reporting on the company does not give a revenue figure for that period, but it is explicit about the response: iSchoolConnect’s technology, “launched in 2017” to support admissions, pivoted “to deliver proctoring services at scale in response to the Covid-19 pandemic” (The PIE News, July 2021). In effect, a five-person-team-turned-35-person admissions startup spent the worst year of its short life building an entirely different product just to stay useful to the institutions it already served.

The turning point

The pivot worked, on its own terms, remarkably well. Since March 2020, iSchoolConnect’s proctoring platform had handled more than three million exams (The PIE News, July 2021) — a scale the company’s core admissions business, serving a few thousand registered students as of 2019 (EdTechReview, August 2019), had never approached. On 29 June 2021, ExamSoft, part of the Turnitin family, announced it had acquired iSchoolConnect’s proctoring and assessment technology outright, folding it into a platform that already served more than 2,000 academic and certification programmes and had administered over 75 million exams (BW Education, June 2021; The PIE News, July 2021). Fernando called the deal validation of iSchoolConnect “as an emerging player in the EdTech space” and said the company would now refocus “on our mission to help higher education institutions revamp their enrolment and engagement processes” (BW Education, June 2021). The sale numbers were not disclosed. What is verifiable is the shape of the trade: a side business built out of necessity, scaled to millions of transactions, sold to a larger specialist, with the proceeds and attention redirected back to the founding business.

The money behind it

iSchoolConnect has never raised anything close to what its better-known Indian rivals have. The disclosed history is thin and comes in small, separate pieces rather than one clean funding table:

• Pre-seed, $400,000 (January 2018) — reported by EdTechReview and YourStory, August 2019.
• Seed, $400,000 (June 2019) — same sources; brought disclosed early-stage funding to roughly $800,000, matching the total that aggregator Tracxn separately lists across three rounds.
• Non-dilutive support (2018) — $100,000 in Google marketing funds and $100,000 in Google Cloud credits, reported alongside the seed round (YourStory, August 2019).
• Seed VC, $1,000,000 (7 September 2023) — from Decart Ventures (Cyprus-based) and Vibranium VC (California-based), reported independently by CB Insights and PitchBook company profiles (accessed September 2026).

Taken together, iSchoolConnect’s disclosed lifetime funding is roughly $1.8 million across known rounds — reported total figures vary by source and period (Tracxn’s $800,000 predates the 2023 round; CB Insights’ $1 million reflects only its latest round), so the ranges above, not a single number, are the honest answer. No post-money valuation has been made public for any round.

How it makes money

The clearest public description of iSchoolConnect’s business model dates to 2019, when the company disclosed two revenue tracks running side by side (EdTechReview, YourStory, August 2019):

• Recruitment as a Service (RaaS) — a commission charged on every international student who enrols in a programme through the platform, aligning revenue directly with completed admissions rather than applications.
• Technology as a Service (TaaS) — sold to institutions, with a minimum $15,000 setup fee plus a minimum $300 monthly subscription for each AI tool deployed (Essay Grader, Video Analyzer, Document Reader, Conversational Assistant).
• Student subscriptions — a free basic tier (apply plus one counselling session), a $400-a-year premium tier (adds interview and SOP grading tools), and a $2,000-a-year pro tier (adds direct consultant access, visa and loan assistance).

The part people get wrong is treating iSchoolConnect as a pure consumer app. Its subscription pricing looks like a study-abroad app, but the RaaS commission and the enterprise TaaS contracts are where an admissions platform’s real margin usually sits, since they are tied to institutions’ recruitment budgets rather than individual students’ willingness to pay. As of 2019, the company said its website drew 100,000 visits a month, converted 10 percent of registrations to paying customers, and had over 7,000 registered students since inception (EdTechReview, August 2019) — figures that are company-stated and have not been refreshed publicly since.

The numbers

iSchoolConnect does not publish revenue or profit-and-loss figures, and neither of its corporate vehicles fills that gap. The US entity is privately held and files no public accounts. Its Indian subsidiary, iSchoolConnect Technologies Private Limited (CIN U72200MH2019PTC333450, incorporated 22 November 2019), carries a paid-up capital of just ₹100,000 and has no revenue, profit or balance-sheet figures on record with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs as of its last filed balance sheet date, 31 March 2023 (ZaubaCorp, MCA filing data, accessed September 2026). Rather than invent a revenue trend that does not exist in the public record, here is what can be verified about the company’s scale over time:

No revenue or profit/loss figures are available for any year — a gap, not an oversight, and one worth naming rather than papering over.

Where the money comes from

• Customer segments: individual students (B2C, subscription plus per-tool add-ons) and higher-education institutions (B2B, setup fee plus per-tool monthly licences) — two very different sales motions run by one product team (EdTechReview, August 2019).
• Geography: the company has stated it focuses on students “originating in Asia and travelling to the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK” (YourStory, August 2019); it now operates offices in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and in Mumbai and Noida, India (iSchoolConnect, About Us).
• Product lines, past and present: the admissions and enrolment-management platform is the continuing core business; a remote exam-proctoring line, built in 2020 and scaled to more than three million exams, was sold to ExamSoft in June 2021 and is no longer part of the company (The PIE News, July 2021).
• The surprise: the business unit that generated iSchoolConnect’s single largest verifiable metric — over three million transactions — was not its founding admissions product but the pandemic-era proctoring tool it built almost as an afterthought, and it is the one part of the company it no longer owns.

The risks

• US visa policy, the market’s biggest swing factor: Indian students enrolled in the US fell 6.9 percent to 352,644 in February 2026, down from 378,787 a year earlier, according to data placed before India’s Parliament (Business Standard, April 2026). Separately, US student-visa rejection rates for Indian applicants were reported at 61 percent, among the worst of any large source country (Hindustan Times, April 2026). Since iSchoolConnect’s RaaS revenue is a commission on completed enrolments, a shrinking, harder-to-clear US pipeline hits the company’s top line directly, not just its addressable market.
• A thin capital base in a well-funded category: iSchoolConnect’s disclosed lifetime funding of roughly $1.8 million sits far behind rivals in the same “study abroad” category. Leverage Edu, also founded in 2017, was closing a reported $20 million Series D in 2026 at a roughly $300 million valuation (up from about $140 million in 2023), on FY26 revenue reported at ₹375 crore, up 112 percent year-on-year from ₹173 crore in FY25 (IPOCentral, May 2026, citing market reports; the round was unconfirmed by the company at the time of reporting). A company running on single-digit-million-dollar funding cannot match that kind of marketing, sales or product spend for long.
• Founding-team concentration: iSchoolConnect’s original co-founder, Don Kphury, exited early, leaving Ashish Fernando as sole founder-CEO for most of the company’s history (YourStory, August 2019). A single founder running both the admissions core and, for a time, an unrelated exam-proctoring line is a thinner leadership bench than most well-funded competitors carry.

The takeaway

The lesson in iSchoolConnect’s history is not the pivot itself — plenty of startups built something adjacent when their core market froze in 2020. It is what the company chose to do once that side project worked: sell it, and go back to the harder, slower business it started with, rather than let a bigger, faster-growing product quietly become the company. That is a defensible strategic call. It is also a bet that the underlying market — students who need help getting into foreign universities — recovers faster than the capital and headcount gap between iSchoolConnect and its better-funded rivals can close. As of September 2026, with US student numbers from India falling rather than growing, that bet has not yet paid off in any way the public record can confirm.

Frequently asked questions

What does iSchoolConnect do?

It runs an AI-based platform that helps students, mainly from Asia, apply to universities in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia through a single application, and sells related AI tools such as document grading and interview analysis to universities for managing international enrolment.

Who founded iSchoolConnect and when?

Ashish Fernando co-founded iSchoolConnect in 2017 with MBA classmate Don Kphury, who left the company early; Fernando has run it as Founder and CEO since (YourStory, August 2019).

How much funding has iSchoolConnect raised?

Disclosed funding totals roughly $1.8 million across known rounds: a $400,000 pre-seed round in January 2018, a $400,000 seed round in June 2019, and a $1 million seed round in September 2023 from Decart Ventures and Vibranium VC. No valuation has been made public.

What happened to iSchoolConnect’s exam-proctoring business?

Built in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it scaled to more than three million proctored exams before iSchoolConnect sold the technology to ExamSoft, part of the Turnitin family, in June 2021, and refocused on its original admissions business.

Is iSchoolConnect profitable, or listed on any exchange?

It is privately held and unlisted. Neither its US parent nor its Indian subsidiary, iSchoolConnect Technologies Private Limited, discloses revenue or profit and loss figures publicly as of September 2026.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• YourStory, “Confused where to study? This startup lets you zero in on the best foreign university,” August 2019
• EdTechReview, “This Mumbai-based Startup Helps Students Find, Apply and Study in Their Preferred Foreign Universities,” August 2019
• BW Education, “ExamSoft Acquires Proctoring And Assessment Technology From iSchoolConnect,” June 2021
• The PIE News, “ExamSoft teams up with iSchoolConnect,” July 2021
• ZaubaCorp, company filing record for iSchoolConnect Technologies Private Limited (CIN U72200MH2019PTC333450), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, iSchoolConnect company profile, 2026
• CB Insights, iSchoolConnect funding and financials profile, accessed September 2026
• PitchBook, iSchoolConnect company profile, accessed September 2026 (via search index)
• YourStory, iSchoolConnect company profile, accessed September 2026
• iSchoolConnect, official website, “About Us,” accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “US visa curbs fallout: Indian students in US drop 6.9% to 352,644 in 2026,” April 2026
• Hindustan Times, “US visa row: Indian students face record 61% visa rejection rate,” April 2026
• IPOCentral, “IPO-Bound Leverage Edu to Raise Over ₹190 Cr in Series D Round,” May 2026

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