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The Kuali project began in 2004, when a group of universities and colleges got together to build software that was a better fit for their needs than what traditional software vendors had to offer. Supported by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the consortium of universities formed a non-profit organization called the Kuali Foundation. The Foundation’s mission was to build better software to serve higher education’s unique needs…
The community of schools grew rapidly in the following years. By the Foundation’s 10-year anniversary, it was clear that there were new challenges for growth under the consortium: speed of development, expectations for a great user experience, evolving cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) models, and the need for a professional marketing & sales organization to grow adoption.
The Kuali community determined that the solution was a for-profit company that would focus on design, speed of delivery, and sales & marketing. A company could scale by recruiting top talent, diversifying the client base, delivering SaaS to generate new revenue streams, and securing additional investment in a way that the institutional collaboration model with the foundation wasn’t able to do.
And so, in 2014, the Kuali Foundation invested in a young company, led by Joel Dehlin, an experienced Chief Technology and Product Officer, and Chris Coppola, a long-time community member and CEO of rSmart.
We’ve been evolving ever since. Today Kuali is a thriving, modern ed tech company focused on continuing the mission that began with that small group of colleges and universities: building amazing software to meet the needs of institutions of higher ed. Everything about the way we operate today, from our approach to community partnership, to our software to our support to our pricing is designed with higher ed in mind.
