Niche began as College Prowler, selling informational college guidebooks, and later pivoted into an edtech platform that partners with campuses and schools to provide information to prospective students. The platform lets users compare metrics like historic acceptance rate, cost, post-graduate earnings, majors, campus life, and grades each school while surfacing reviews, similar schools, and ranked lists (e.g., best dorms, most diverse colleges). It aims to simplify the college search process so students don’t need multiple tabs or spreadsheets. Niche grew from zero to 1,400 clients in the past three years, increased ARR by more than 100% in 2019, and expanded its client base by over 60% year-over-year; it was cash-flow positive for the majority of the year. The company cites a potential market of roughly 40,000 schools and is positioning its product to help colleges market to prospective students amid the digitization of admissions. With new funding, Niche plans to support colleges as they adopt digital tours and other virtual solutions when in-person visits are limited. Niche provides comprehensive rankings, report cards, and profiles for every K‑12 school, college, neighborhood, and major employer in America by analyzing dozens of data sets and hundreds of millions of ratings and reviews. The company says more than 60 million people used its platform last year to choose schools, jobs, and neighborhoods. Niche has an enrollment/subscription recruiting platform for K‑12 schools and colleges and expanded that product last year. Sales for that subscription recruiting platform grew 200% in 2018, and Niche now helps more than 800 client schools find best‑fit students. The company counts 31% of all U.S. boarding schools and 18% of all liberal arts colleges as paid subscribers. Leadership frames its opportunity around demographic shifts—Millennials entering parenthood and Gen Z going to college—and positions the platform to capture decisions families make about education, real estate, and work. Niche operates an online service that helps students and parents find and evaluate schools from kindergarten through college using data-driven rankings and local guidance. The company began in 2002 as College Prowler, originally selling physical college guidebooks, and later rebranded to Niche. It aggregates data points across the U.S. and surfaces results for queries like “Best Suburbs of Chicago” or “Best Private Schools in New York City.” Niche reports sizable traffic, with 50 million uniques last year and about 8 million visits per month this year. The company has been run lean, reinvesting cashflows and growing near break even. Following the recent raise, Niche plans to ramp more aggressively and increase headcount from 56 to 80 by the end of the year.

Total raised

$44M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Apr 2020