Exclusive: EdVisorly Raises $13.3M Series A To Fix The Messy College Transfer Process With AI

figure — when Manny Smith was a high school senior, attending college didn’t look like an option. His parents had no college credits, the family couldn’t afford tuition, and he didn’t know how to apply.

His path only changed during his second semester of high school, when a sports scholarship landed him a spot at the U.S. Air Force Academy — an acceptance that transformed him from a teenager with no money for college into a military officer. Smith spent eight years on active duty, serving as a technical product manager building satellite software for national defense for the Air Force and Space Force. When he returned home from a seven-month deployment, Smith looked at the data surrounding community college transfers to four-year universities and realized how low the success rates were. Manny Smith, founder and CEO of EdVisorly. (Courtesy photo) “You have a higher chance of success [of attaining a bachelor’s degree] by pursuing a military academy … than if you go to any community college …,” Smith said in an interview with Crunchbase News. “That didn’t really make sense to me.” He then entered graduate school and launched EdVisorly in 2019 while working on his MBA at UC Berkeley. Now, the Los Angeles-based startup tells Crunchbase News exclusively that it has secured a $13.3 million Series A funding round to scale its AI-native platform, which automates the manual back-office workflows that can slow down university admissions. Breachway Capital led the financing, which included participation from U.S. News & World Report, Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Foundation, Motley Fool Ventures, Juvo Ventures, Zeal Capital Partners, and others. The new capital brings EdVisorly’s total funding to about $22 million and marks a significant valuation step-up from its previous tranches, according to CEO Smith. The startup’s funding comes amid an overall downturn in investment in the sector. Venture funding to education-related companies has in recent years come in at a fraction of the sums such startups raised during the pandemic peak, when investment topped out at nearly $20 billion in 2021. Through the first half of 2026, however, edtech and education-related startups have raised just under $1.8 billion globally, per Crunchbase data. That’s below the $2.5 billion raised in the first half of last year, but a notch higher than the $1.4 billion raised in the second half of 2025.