The Business Challenge
The business situation the organisation faced before the project began.
Higher-education technology discovery is fragmented across vendor pages, institutional websites, expert knowledge, reviews, and manually maintained spreadsheets.
Colleges need a reliable way to find relevant software and service providers, while vendors need a credible channel to reach verified higher-ed decision makers.
Building that required more than a website: it needed a searchable data platform, account system, billing, operational tooling, deployment pipeline, and data enrichment workflows that could scale beyond manual curation.
How the Solution Was Delivered
Discovery, design, development, testing and rollout — the journey, not the tooling.
- 1Defined the product architecture and core data model for universities, experts, vendors, software, services, ratings, billing, and search
- 2Built the Django backend, account flows, admin workflows, REST APIs, and production data operations
- 3Implemented Vue/Vuetify user interfaces for search, profiles, software/service discovery, and account management
- 4Integrated Algolia search across Profile, Service, Software, and University models with version-controlled index settings
- 5Implemented Stripe subscription billing and customer/account management for B2B monetization
- 6Built deployment automation with GitHub Actions, migrations, static asset collection, Algolia reindexing, and cache refreshes
- 7Added operational data workflows for university technology detection, news collection, and database maintenance
- 8Integrated Azure OpenAI and CrewAI workflows for AI-assisted provider research, software/service descriptions, and university news filtering
- 9Maintained and evolved the platform through production usage, enterprise customer needs, and VC-backed growth
Business Outcomes & Impact
The measurable outcomes recorded on this AI Case Study — with the story behind them.
Architected and engineered a VC-backed B2B SaaS platform with enterprise paying customers, covering 4,000+ U.S. colleges and universities and 950+ solution providers, with AI-assisted enrichment workflows and production subscription billing.
Business Outcome Categories
The story behind the numbers
EdTech Connect became a production B2B SaaS platform with enterprise paying customers and a successful venture-backed investment round. The platform organized higher-ed technology discovery around structured, searchable data instead of fragmented manual research, covering more than 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities and more than 950 solution providers.
It supported search, institutional profiles, provider listings, expert profiles, subscriptions, billing, data enrichment, deployment automation, and operational workflows from a single engineered platform.
AI-assisted workflows improved the ability to generate provider context, filter university news for relevance, and keep institutional intelligence more useful for higher-ed decision makers.
Lessons Learned
What surprised the team, what worked well, and what would be done differently.
- AI features are most valuable when attached to a strong underlying product architecture and data model
- Search quality depends as much on structured data and indexing discipline as on AI enrichment
- B2B SaaS credibility requires billing, deployment, admin, data maintenance, and operational workflows, not only a polished front end
- For AI-assisted research workflows, human-readable outputs need strict schemas, filtering rules, and downstream database integration
- Enterprise customers and investors respond better to working systems with operational depth than to isolated AI demos