ApplyBoard's Basiri brothers turned their own study-abroad struggle into a $1.4B unicorn

ApplyBoard is a SaaS-enabled recruitment platform that matches international students with foreign universities and colleges and lets them apply through one common application.

Build a free-to-students matching platform for study-abroad, funded instead by revenue share with the schools that land the students.

Brothers Martin, Meti and Massi Basiri launched ApplyBoard in 2015 in Kitchener, Ontario, after experiencing firsthand how hard it was to come to Canada as international students from Iran. They built a platform to let students answer a few questions and get matched to eligible schools, then apply to multiple programs through one common application.

The company grew fast: revenue was up 12,525% between 2015 and 2018 per Deloitte's Fast 50, and grew another 500% year-over-year in 2019 alone, according to co-founder Martin Basiri. It raised a $40M Series B roughly a year before closing $75M in May 2020, led by Drive Capital along with Fidelity Investments Canada and the Business Development Bank of Canada, bringing total funding to $122.5M and pushing valuation to $1.4B.

ApplyBoard works with over 1,200 postsecondary institutions and 4,000 recruitment partners, has helped more than 100,000 students apply, and had grown headcount to 400 employees across 20 countries — 2.5x its headcount a year earlier — while planning further expansion into the UK and sourcing students from South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

The founders were the customer first, which let them design around a specific pain point rather than a guessed-at one.

A revenue-share model with schools, rather than fees on students, removed the biggest adoption barrier for the population least able to pay upfront.

Machine-learning matching replaced an offline, counselor-dependent process with something that scaled to any country.

Founders who lived the problem as customers first had an edge in a market built on offline counseling — and a revenue-share model kept the product free to the people who needed it most.

As of May 2020, ApplyBoard partners with over 1,200 postsecondary institutions and 4,000 recruitment partners, has helped over 100,000 students apply to schools, employs 400 people across 20 countries, and is expanding beyond Canada, the US and the UK into new source markets in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.