RISE- Pocket Counselor

Lets dig deeper into the problem statement. Statistics show upto 68% of tertiary education applicants opt for private counseling.  Market research for student discovery revealed that 79% of services users have described them as incomplete, misleading, time-consuming, and expensive. Even after spending 200$/Hour for premium counseling and   approx. $10-12000 for Test preparation classes, students and parents put a combined effort of 200-400 hrs in this exhausting exercise of perfect university course selection and admission application. Students have to hop from one service provider to another in search for complete set of services. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that low-income students are often steered toward commission-yielding or less-selective colleges, even if they have the academic qualifications to attend more prestigious institutions.

On the other hand, Universities often discover a mismatch among students expectations and their offerings. Institutional audit reports are now detecting increasing number of incomplete and misaligned applications resulting in unsuccessful attempts. Upto 38% of seats in universities and colleges run unfulfilled each year. Not to forget, millions of $ are spent on marketing of programs in anticipation of reaching out to qualifying applicants as well.

What if we built a product that bridges this gap between students expectations and counseling services. We are talking about a student-centric platform empowered by seasoned counselors and coaches offering holistic, data driven and unbiased admission solutions to dream universities and colleges worldwide.

 and did I mention that it is Free, students can actually save a fortune and utilize it towards paying for their Education. 

Value for Students and parents:
Financial benefit: Est Savings: Upto 10,000$
Time Savings: Estimate 100 Hrs.
Unbiased from Human decision making and knowledge.
No dependence or wait for appointment.
Anywhere Anytime counseling
All services under one platform
Comparative Analysis of all University and courses
Savings Money on Application fee and Test Registration
Value for Universities and Colleges:
Access to eligible and polished applicants
Faculty/marketing team addressing to target pool of applicants
Save time and Marketing money
All their database more user friendly and simplified ready for students use.
Value to Counselors/Education Enthusiast:
Remote setup- Resources can leverage their residence to continue helping students
Non-Sales platform letting counselors focus on quality of services
Societal Impact
All students under one platform treated equally. Letting them explore their profile
potential, motivate them to aim high, prepare and polish their profile to maximize their
chances.
Domestic + International- Worldwide
Playing an Honest role in most important decision of their life-Higher Education 

Aakriti Jain – Founder & CEO The founder being an awarded pioneer Education Counselor will be utilizing all her decade and a half experience and skills owing to accreditation and certification from PIER, ICEF, IDP and British Council to lead a team of seasoned experienced counselors and continue helping students achieve dream of studying in Top Tier Universities globally.

Kunal Vijan – CTO Technical Co-founder working as UI Architect hailing from 16 years’ experience in web development is all committed to offer data driven solutions facilitating international and domestic admissions.

Advisory Board- CFO, Data Scientist and Angel Investor with 3 exits

We will be hiring team of equally enthusiastic individuals. Majority female Our Founders
Team will include:
Research Team: 23 + Interns
(5) US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ, Dubai/UAE, India Germany, Asia, Europe ROW Process
Expert
(5 + Interns) US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ, Dubai/UAE, India Germany, Asia, Europe ROW
College/University Partnership and Engagement Specialist
(1+ Intern) Scholarship Database Associate
(2) Education Loan Specialist
(2) Finance Team (to assist in Offer Acceptance and tuition fee payment)
(1) Visa Team
(1) Ticketing and currency Exchange
(2) Editors (SOP/LOR/Essays)
(2) Job Portal
(2) Mentor/Buddy Connect
Technical Team:9
(1) Dev Ops
(1) Architect
(1) Testers
(4) Developers
(1) Designers
(1) Project Manager
Marketing Team:5
(1) Content writers
(2) Social media and Outreach Manager + Interns
(1) Video Creator and Editor
(1) University and Organization marketing
Business Team: 5
(1) Founder/ CEO
(1) CTO
(1) CFO (Finance and Legal advice)
(1) Media and Outreach manager
(1) Business Analyst
With this we foresee to being and increase employment in US, increase our wonderful
female equally or more talented education industry employment, reduce gender biased
income disparity, increase education sector reach.

Being in EdTech, Higher Education is a second child. While first K12 is getting all attention and scope.

Now, in order to help more students gets the benefits of quality counseling, we had to digitalize our services. 

I have bootstrapped all stages of the Offline Pilot and startup setup till now we are in product development stage. I am self learning and applying my knowledge to built this impeccable product which beats the one sided revenue motive of counseling businesses. But this counselor needs support, there is an ocean of unexplored obstacles which I am solving one by one but is taking time.

Seeking education enthausiast who are ready to solve the admission complexities once in for all students worldwide. 

Bootstrapping has really tied my hands, and maximum resources are diverted towards exploring and understanding, with SOLVE team's support, I can save time and effort in exploring in all aspects.

There are 2 kind of service providers now- Direct and Indirect competitors who either offer limited Free services or paid premium services to either domestic or international students but not usually both. We have created this hybrid Freemium model after studying theindustry trends and journeys.

This way we have reverse engineered the solution to create this hybrid Freemium model by combining the benefits of premium and free counseling patterns to mitigate any ill effects. This will give us an advantageous edge from our direct and Indirect competitors who either offer limited Free services or Paid premium services to either domestic or International students but not usually both. 

rather than creating for niche category of students, our product can be customised to service all categoties with equal glory. 

Global Higher Education EdTech is 7th among the fastest growing industry with 17.3% of Growth rate annually. In 2022, there were 275 Million students worldwide who undergo a phase of huge Dilemma and anxiety before embarking on their exciting higher education journey. Out of these 61.71 M students are in US and India

Higher Education is a fast-paced, evolving industry. Even after the pandemic and some country shutting their borders for international students, this industry has defied all odds and have stood tall. This will also aid in much needed boosting employment in Education sector which is suffering from high surge in opportunities resulting in current providers involuntarily exiting
the industry in search of better paying jobs in different domain to sustain their living. 

With the right Marketing strategies, we are projecting to benefit 0.3% of International student based in India and US and 0.1% of Domestic student base, totaling 66000 student with overall Income Potential of 10.02M $ at the end of First Application year.

We will be extending our services to other countries one by one in subsequent years and will move from Online only platform to setting up branch offices in next 5 years to reach to ARR of $140M by servicing 1 M students.

To ensure Market Validity we ran an offline pilot where we were providing 1 on 1 counseling and admission services and were able to service 160 students and had built a network of 1400 universities and colleges, as well as 15 education loan providers and also made a revenue of revenue of 42000$ in this test run. Now, as we transition from a small-scale operation to a startup, we're excited to digitalize our services and reach even more students in need.

Product
Rise is a free SaaS-based platform empowered by seasoned counselors offering holistic,
data driven and unbiased admission solutions to dream universities worldwide.
Rise provides artificial intelligence driven automated high-quality end to end counseling
and admission services for student aiming for post-secondary education worldwide. Our
aim is to provide free Premium personalized Counseling, tutoring and mentoring services
by market’s premium facilitators automated through AI and ML methods to meet the
personalized needs of every student worldwide and are designed with thorough market
research, based on statistical reports and reliable data from sources which otherwise are
not available to individuals; it gives students all control and liberty of taking informed
decision about their education.
The offline pilot product has already gained significant traction in the market, and we
believe it has the potential to disrupt the industry.
Vision
Edtech platform servicing students globally to ascertain their best fit and empower their
profile for triumphant admission.
Mission
Rise is on a mission to uplift higher education aspirant’s potential by providing holistic,
data driven and unbiased admission services for domestic and international education
seekers. Thus, enriching students with their deserving Right to Education. 

Rise Higher Education is world’s first automated Education Counseling provider.
It is one-of-a-kind innovation which will act according to whims and fences of students,
optimizing Cloud Infrastructure and services, AI, ML driven data techniques chatbots, deep
learning, decision trees to provide personalized counseling solutions to the students even in
rural and far-flung areas.
Introducing our Effective Counseling facilitated through computer adaptive multilingual
humanoid robot which personalizes and deliver verbal results and associated transcripts
from our state of art cutting-edge ML methods which responds according to keywords input
by students during profile form filling.
Our multilingual demonstration will give an option to change the counseling language and
closed caption in listeners preferred language/mother’s tongue. Developing NLP using java
and python technologies speech recognition which will facilitate students in verbal and
written communication with the bots.
Cloud based database and multi-region data storage to ensure user will get faster and
accurate results from HTTP based APIs to facilitate course selection.
Perfecting the Art of shortlisting using official records from university resources and data
banks like US NEWS, IIE Open Doors, Times Higher Ranking, QS, etc. to provide cross
functional data based on student’s profile and matching eligibility, feasible data along with
practical life competitive scores, admission predictability score, profile competitiveness for
students to take calculated risks. By providing accurate data we are empowering students
to take informed choices and not push them to choose among our array of partner
universities only. This is the major impact will bring game changer innovation.
Developed the Digital Coaching Avatars will test students’ readiness using mock tests and
offer customized preparation classes accordingly for most common tests like
IELTS/Toefl/GRE/GMAT/SAT/ACT/LSAT. Continuous progress tracking and evaluation will
ensure students’ progress.
Scholarship and Education Loan feature allow students to find their eligible options and
plan better for finances. This will be done through linking their APIs on our platform
Introducing our AI enabled 24*7 Bot services - Students will get an answer to queries as
and when they require with no dependency on providers working timeframe. Our Intelligent
Bot can understand and give results based on keywords and sentences both. The Data
security system will keep all student’s information intact and secured visible to student
only. The explanation of each application requirement and document ensures error free
application to mitigate any refusal chances