HSCRED.COM
DETAILS
HSCred.app:
Verified Academic Talent for College Admissions
Performance-based admissions intelligence — at scale, for the post-SFFA era. The talent was always there. Now admissions offices can see it.
Raising $2M Seed to scale from NYC pilot to the first 1,000 verified student transcripts.

by HSCred, Inc.

The Problem: 160-Year-Old Assessment in a Changing World.
Broken Tools
GPAs are not comparable across 27,000 high schools. Personal essays are routinely coached and increasingly AI-generated. NACAC agrees that standardized tests don't help, and over 1,900 colleges have gone test-optional.
No Alternative
They've opted out without anything to opt into. Admissions officers are left making life-altering decisions based on grade-inflated GPAs, AI-polished personal essays, and formulaic recommendation letters.
Portfolio Gap
Performance-based assessment is the acknowledged gold standard — but it cannot scale. A university receiving 50,000 applications cannot hire trained readers to review a portfolio of authentic student work for every candidate.
Brilliant Work Goes Unseen
Thousands of students produce sophisticated, original academic work each year that goes entirely unnoticed by admissions officers. The students who need this most are already doing the work — they just lack a stage.
WHY NOW: The K-Shaped Classroom
Assessment is dividing students by what they're asked to produce
Creators
Students expected to publish academic work use AI to create original content based on their own interests.
Scrollers
Students expected to pass a standardized test use AI to offload busywork that feels irrelevant to their lives.
The Solution: From 'How Did You Score?' to 'Did You Get Published?'
Scholarly Youth Media Platform
HSCred is a scholarly, YouTube-style platform exclusively for 11th and 12th grade students — where all work is produced under teacher supervision and evaluated by three adjunct professors before publication.
Pre-Evaluated at the Point of Login
By the time any admissions officer logs in, their work is done. No need to read essays or review portfolios. Universities receive free access to transcripts from individual applicants and can pay to search for other candidates.
Hard Earned
This is not anti-testing — it is what students do after they pass the test. Our STAKE-PITCH-MINT™ technology scales performance based assessment for all by ensuring authenticity, academic rigor, and integrity of each project, making it impossible to game Academic Capital with shortcuts or AI. Work is produced under the supervision of a pedagogue and validated by three university-selected experts.
SFFA-Compliant
Universities that subscribe to our database of students with published academic work can filter by 88 demographic indicators — a race-neutral way to build the class they want, at 1% of their current cost per acquisition. Every transcript of reviewed work also saves the price of paid essay review and portfolio scoring. A student from the South Bronx, Osaka, or rural Mississippi can submit and be published. No AP or IB program? No problem.
How It Works
HSCred converts student project-based learning into standardized, externally verified admissions data.
1
01 Study & Prepare
The student studies content — flashcards, quizzes, reading, annotating — until their teacher certifies they have the foundation knowledge required to start a deep-dive project worthy of publication.
2
02 Browse & Select (STAKE)
The student browses channels on HSCred, selecting based on other student work previously published and the channel's publication criteria.
3
03 Multiple Drafts (PITCH)
A certified pedagogue guides the student off platform, signing off that they supervised the student through multiple rounds of feedback and revision.
4
04 Expert Review & Publish (MINT)
The work is uploaded to a committee of three paid experts who independently evaluate the work product for academic excellence.
Market Size & Structural Tailwinds
HSCred enters the admissions market through assessment infrastructure, then expands into recurring institutional search and recruitment software.
$7.4B+
Total Market
U.S. college readiness, standardized testing
& performance-based assessment
7.7M+
U.S. high school juniors and seniors
Base for project submissions.
1,900+
Colleges
With test-optional or test-free admissions policies,
5,000 total 2- and 4-year colleges
30,000
Initial Distribution Network
Enrolled annually across
25 active CollegeNOW programs
Unit Economics
The value of the platform compounds as recurring SaaS revenue grows against a fixed and expanding transcript database.
1. Institutional SaaS Subscriptions
Local Scale (CUNY)
$1,000/mo
1,000+ transcripts
Searchable database of published student transcripts. SFFA compliant. Surfaces high-performing scholars — no scoring required.
Regional Scale (NYS)
$3,000/mo
10,000+ transcripts
Statistically significant regional dataset for major state university adoption.
National Scale
$4,125/mo
50,000+ transcripts
Early-adopter pricing creates durable switching cost.
2. Volume Driver
Deck of 50 Access Cards
$5,000
Covers 50 student project evaluations.
Additional Card
$100
1 student video evaluated by 3-expert committee.
Extended Expiration
$1,000
Adds a year to all 50 codes; available at purchase only.
Management Dashboard
Included
Distribute, monitor, and reassign cards.
3. Transcript of Published Work
Students are our "Investor Class" in Academic Capital. The volume and quality of their work drives the platform's value — making students our MVP investors, staking their time and talent. In return, they get FREE lifetime access to and ownership of their published content, with FREE tools to share their full transcript or individual videos. Students control their own discoverability for university and foundation opportunities. Only educational nonprofits can pay to access our video metadata analytics — because they bring real value to the students who come to HSCred to be discovered.
Only HSCred Solves All Three.
Portfolio assessment, expert validation, and scale have never existed in one product. Their intersection is a new category — Academic Capital: a permanent, externally validated record of what a student produced, published, and defended.

Will Universities Pay?
Yes. And here's why it's a no-brainer.
$2,500
Cost per enrolled student
Acquisition budget
1%
HSCred national subscription
Share of acquisition budget
1,900+
Test-optional colleges
No replacement signal
A university processing 50,000 applications spends $50K–$250K before reading a single essay. HSCred delivers pre-evaluated, published candidates for ~$49,500/year. The candidates arrive already vetted.
Why They Can't Say No
Test-Optional Gap
1,900+ colleges dropped test scores with no credible replacement. HSCred is the only verified academic signal available.
SFFA Compliance
Post-Supreme Court ruling, race-conscious admissions are gone. HSCred filters by subject, region, and non-race demographics.
Portrait of a Graduate
NY's Regents phase-out (2028) mandates performance-based assessment statewide. HSCred is the only platform built for it since passage (2025).
Flywheel Network-Effects
01
CUNY Level
1,000–2,500
Pilot becomes essential NYC recruitment pipeline in the nation's largest market
02
Regional
10,000
Major state university adoption statewide.
03
National
50,000+
National infrastructure layer for verified academic assessment.
Traction & Growth
10+ years of product development, institutional relationship building, and assessment model validation. Then, in July 2025, the NY State Board of Regents passed the "Portrait of a Graduate," creating legislative demand for performance-based credentialing by 2028. An anchor cohort of 600+ students is underway through the CCNY STEM Institute in 2026. The platform is live at hscred.app with over $250,000 invested in R&D since 2015 by the founder.
Phase 1: Completed (2015–2025)
Over $250,000 invested in research, platform design, and technical development. Platform built on React, TypeScript, Next.js, Django, PostgreSQL, and AWS. HSCred trademark secured. White paper and research brief published. International pilot partnership completed with Osaka University. Platform live at hscred.app.
Phase 2: NYC Growth (Jan '26–June '27)
1k published transcripts
Coalition established with CCNY STEM Institute and YJC with emerging CollegeNOW expansion to 30,000 students enrolled annually across 25 CUNY CollegeNOW programs establish HSCred brand in the nation's largest school district.
Phase 3: Statewide Expansion (Jul '27–Jun '29)
10K published transcipts
Access cards listed on ShopDOE.
Expand statewide to SUNY and BOCES.
First institutional subscriptions from CUNY.
Phase 4: National Scale (Jul '29–Jun '31)
50k+ published transcripts.
This stage still represents only 0.6% of student TAM excluding international or market vertical expansion.
Financial Projections
Revenue scales as transcript volume grows from database build-out to high-margin SaaS.
2027
CD: 6–20 decks
SaaS: 0 subscriptions
$30K–$100K • GM: 4%
Seed deployment begins
2028
CD: 45–90 decks
SaaS: 0–12 (@$1k/mo)
$225K–$594K • GM: 31%
First SaaS subscriptions
2029
CD: 100–400 decks
SaaS: 20–200 (@$3k/mo)
$1.2M–$2.7M • GM: 77%
ShopDOE launch, regional tier unlocked
2030
CD: 200–500 decks
SaaS: 100–300
$4.6M–$13.3M • GM: 75%
Statewide expansion, SaaS majority
2031
CD: 1,000–3,000 decks
SaaS: 300–500
$20M–$40M • GM: 72%
National scale
SEED ROUND MILESTONES
Raising: $2M Seed — deployed beginning Q1 2027
Deployed toward: expansion with a trusted brand, CollegeNOW; first monetization threshold (Q4 2027)
SERIES A MILESTONES
$9M Series A closes against:
(1) 1,000+ published student transcripts on platform
(2) First CUNY admissions office on paid subscriptions
(3) NY State Portrait of a Graduate in active implementation
Use of Funds: $2M Seed
Seed capital is designed to establish trust in the HSCred brand within NYC, the nation's largest school district.
Growth Team
50% / $1.0M - school district sales
15% / $300K — university partnerships
Integrate card deck sales into NYC DOE one-click purchasing platform. Work within CUNY to onboard first SaaS client.
Platform & Product Team
22% / $440K

Product infrastructure, workflow automation, and admissions analytics.
Operations
13% / $260K

Legal, accounting, insurance, hiring, and leadership onboarding.
$2M
Seed Round
$9M
Series A (2028)
$23.6M
Projected 2031 Revenue
We spent a decade building the infrastructure. Now we are scaling the network.
One former public school principal and his wife spent decades and $250K of their life savings to build it. We're raising $2M now to own the category before anyone else can.

The talent was always there.
Now we're publishing it.