Scholarship app Scholly lately made a giant announcement: Training lender SLM Corp, higher often known as Sallie Mae, is buying its key property for an undisclosed quantity. That features Scholly’s app, scholarship administration expertise and Scholly Provides, a platform that matches customers with strategic companions to assist them earn money again.

“This may enable us to do what it will have required my elevating tens of tens of millions of {dollars} to do alone,” says Scholly founder Christopher Grey.

Launched about eight years in the past, Scholly matches college students searching for non-public scholarship cash with seemingly scholarships, serving to them earn greater than $100 million in monetary assist up to now, in line with the corporate. The app additionally consists of such options as an AI-powered proofreader.

The Capability to Scale

For Grey, the acquisition will present the flexibility to develop the enterprise. As well as, Sallie Mae will make Scholly, which used to price $2.99 a month, free for all customers. “Our precedence is creating extra scholarship alternatives,” says Grey. “Think about all of the partnerships we’ve completed—We’re simply going to proceed that on steroids.”

Lately, Scholly has fashioned a wide range of partnerships with everybody from Amazon to rapper Lil Nas X. In 2022, for instance, it teamed up with Google to create a $10,000 scholarship for girls from marginalized communities of coloration in tech. Earlier that yr, the corporate joined forces with entrepreneur and writer Bryce Thompson to supply Thompson’s second $100,000 scholarship—10 $10,000 awards given to 10 college students.

Customers can search the app for scholarships utilizing a number of parameters, similar to state, GPA and main. They then get an outline of the scholarship, how a lot cash is given away and the deadline for making use of, amongst different info.

For Sallie Mae, the acquisition is a part of an effort to place itself as what Donna Vieira, government vice chairman and chief industrial officer calls, “an training options firm.” “It’s very aligned with our mission,” she says. The transfer follows Sallie Mae’s acquisition of the property of training expertise agency Nitro School in 2022. Scholly shall be a part of Sallie Mae’s training line of enterprise, which says Vieira, “is concentrated on producing merchandise and instruments and content material to have interaction college students and households on this journey to and thru greater training.”

The son of a struggling single mom, Grey couldn’t afford to attend faculty. So, he determined to use for personal scholarships to school, finally incomes $1.3 million in awards from such locations because the Invoice and Melinda Gates Basis and the Coca-Cola Students Basis. He attended Drexel College, finding out finance and entrepreneurship, and, whereas there, determined to not waste all of the scholarship acumen he’d developed. So he created an app that may assist different college students searching for assist.