The funding round was led by Highland Europe with additional participation from Stride.VC. Since its inception in 2017, Unibuddy has raised a total of $32m. 

“By 2025, our goal is to partner with institutions to empower 10 million students to progress on their higher education journey”

Unibuddy said the investment comes after a “record-breaking” year for the company when it almost tripled its revenues. To date, Unibuddy has partnered with 450+ higher education customers to help prospective students applying to college in 35 countries worldwide.

“By 2025, our goal is to partner with institutions to empower 10 million students to progress on their higher education journey,” said Diego Fanara, co-founder and CEO of Unibuddy.

“We will triple the size of our engineering team, expanding our product suite and with it, our role in the higher education journey – from selecting a program, to onboarding to post-graduation. 

“In particular, the team will double down on efforts in the United States and APAC where there is a strong appetite for university admissions and recruitment teams to engage with both domestic and international students.” 

The UK is currently Unibuddy’s largest market, where the platform has more than 80% of local institutions on board, including the University of Cambridge, Imperial College and King’s College London. 

In 2019, Unibuddy announced a partnership with UCAS which manages almost three million applications from around 700,000 candidates each year. 

More than 35% of prospective students speaking through Unibuddy’s platform are based in the UK, which is also one of the top five markets for international student demand (12% of students studying in the UK come from abroad). 

“The higher education market is projected to reach almost $118bn by 2027 and areas such as recruitment and retention are ripe for innovation,” Fergal Mullen, partner at Highland Europe, said. 

“Unibuddy’s impressive list of institutional partners and growing participation from students around the world are indicative of the platform’s impact on university marketing and recruitment.” 

Mullen said that Highland Europe knows from conversations with many university administrators that Unibuddy delivers “significant benefits” by enabling them to more effectively target suitable student applicants and to improve yield on offers made. 

“We also noted that Unibuddy positively impacts first-year retention which is a huge win for universities. We’re excited to invest in disruptive products such as Unibuddy and the ambitious teams behind them,” he said.  

Fred Destin of Stride.VC added that Unibuddy empowers students to take that life-changing leap of faith, to build the confidence to go study anywhere in the world their talent takes them. 

“At Stride.VC that’s a mission we are happy to double down on and put both our name and capital behind,” he said.