College Resources and Community Site Unigo Gets Funding; Launches
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
Unigo, a New York City-based colleges resources and student community site, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from a bunch of prominent investors, and has also launched its site after two years in development. Among the investors include Frank Sica, a board member at JetBlue, Carl Hamann, co-founder, ConsumerSearch.com (sold to NY Times), David Olson, Partner at Yucaipa Global, Paul Britton, founder of Capstone hedge fund, and others. The site has information on 225 of America's colleges and universities, and it has added student reviews and campus life information on top of it, a bit like a social media version of U.S. News' top schools franchise. Besides being a resource to high school students and parents researching colleges, Unigo is also pitching itself as platform for college students to create and share content about their college lives. But that would be a tough one, considering Facebook's dominance in college social scene.
Some interesting history to the founder/CEO Jordan Goldman, now 26 years old. As a 17 year-old Goldman was featured in a New York Times (NYSE: NYT) article on the college admissions process, and later the specifics of Goldman's own college search (along with a few others) later became the subject of Steinberg's NYT bestselling book The Gatekeepers. From there on, Goldman went on to write "Students' Guide to Colleges" guide book in 2005.
By Rafat Ali