Campus.

Campus is an accredited online college that grants associate degrees in as little as two years. Classes are taught live rather than as recorded lectures, and many of the professors also teach at universities like NYU and UCLA. The degree programs are practical: business with an applied AI concentration, plus information technology and healthcare administration.

The point is access. Tuition is $7,320 a year, and many enrolled students cover it entirely through the federal Pell Grant program, with nothing out of pocket and no debt. Campus provides laptops and Wi-Fi to students who need them and assigns each student a personal success coach for tutoring, career services, and wellness support. Just over 3,000 students are enrolled today, and the graduation rate for full-time, first-time students is 68 percent, well above the community-college norm.

What they're building

The product is a college, and a college is mostly infrastructure. Campus holds accreditation from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, a lineage that runs back to 1999 through the institution formerly known as MTI College. That accreditation is what makes its students eligible for federal aid.

On top of it sits the delivery system, which covers live synchronous instruction, the coaching operation, and the software that holds it all together. Jerome Pesenti, who held VP roles at Meta and IBM Watson, runs technology as CTO, a serious hire for a two-year college and a signal of where the advantage lies. Graduates can stop with the degree or use it as a transfer path into four-year universities.

Why we backed the founders and team

Most education startups sell software around the edges of the institution. Founder Tade Oyerinde, who previously built Campuswire into a platform used at more than 300 universities, took the harder route of becoming the institution. That meant accreditation and federal aid eligibility, then the slow work of enrollment, retention, and graduation rates. It added up to years of certification and operations where nothing demos well.

That is the kind of assembly we look for. The hard part is bolting live instruction, coaching, hardware, and federal aid plumbing into one accredited machine that a Pell Grant can pay for. No single technology does that. If Campus holds its graduation rate as it scales, it will have rebuilt the community college. The transfer on-ramp to four-year universities will run through it.