GrantMe

Build Your Future

INNOVATIONS

OF THE WORLD

FOR TODAY'S BIG THINKERS

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GrantMe is a platform that provides students with the tools and skills to create a fulfilling future. Thousands of students use GrantMe to win scholarships, get into their top choice school and access high paying student jobs.

As captain of the UBC women’s soccer team, I led the Thunderbirds to the 2015 national championship while laying the foundation for GrantMe. I’d earned a scholarship to play soccer, but started applying to additional awards to cover my housing, books and food.

After finishing my last season of soccer and in my last semester of university, I founded GrantMe at age 22, based on my own experience of winning scholarships and avoiding student debt. I started doing
presentations across British Columbia sharing my own experiences of graduating debt free and realized that there were thousands of students that didn’t have the resources required to understand their financial
options.

Students using GrantMe’s platform can create a profile based on their grade point average, volunteer experience, study interest and other unique criteria. and will instantly get matched to hundreds of scholarships. The average student that uses our web application will match to over $500,000 in scholarships.

GrantMe offers a free version of this web application in order to make the platform accessible to all students. It also offers a paid premium version that has higher quality matching available and allows students to get their scholarship and university essays edited and scored against previous winning essays.

The student debt crisis is a $26 billion dollar problem in Canada that we are committed to tackling. We discovered that most students do not win scholarships because they simply do not apply. And they do not apply because they do not believe they can win. So we’ve gone after this problem headlong, and we’ve built a technology enabled platform to serve students in building their dream career without debt.

We are the only company in Canada that has combined technology and service equally to give students the support that they need in financing their education.

In many ways, it is our use of technology that has differentiated us in the industry. Most traditional education consulting companies require students to come to an office. We have built an online community that has allowed us to reach students in remote and rural communities so that they can access the same opportunities. Our scholarship matching app has aggregated scholarship data in a way that allows us to work with students in every province.

Education is outdated in many ways and our goal at GrantMe is to have students access the education and career of their dreams without putting themselves into debt. We are fundamentally changing the way in which students think about their education.

Our growth trajectory is unique given that we have bootstrapped the business thus far. We have a total network of over 50,000 students across Canada who have been able to access our community. Our team has grown to a team of 40 and we have grown our revenue by 300% year over year since 2017. We have grown into a profitable business and are addressing an important need. It’s a perfect combination of business and social impact and I’m really lucky to have hit that in my first business venture. I am also a firm believer that youth can start profitable businesses without taking on debt. This is exactly the same as my belief that students can go to school without debt.

Looking back, even though this was my first business and I started it while still a student, I watched both my parents operate small businesses which I believe unconsciously built my own entrepreneurial spirit.

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