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Smart Consolidation: How Pathify Is Rewiring Campus Tech
00:24:58
In this episode of EdTech Connect, host Jeff Dillon sits down with Chase Williams, CEO and co-founder of Pathify, to explore how modern digital engagement platforms are transforming the fragmented student experience. Born out of Chase’s own frustrations as a student at Monash University, Pathify has grown into a global solution serving nearly 250 institutions by consolidating communication, tasks, and resources into a single, intuitive hub. Chase shares how Pathify’s middleware integration layer bridges siloed systems (from SIS to LMS to financial aid), why reducing "digital treasure hunts" boosts student success (like Pacific University’s 85% drop in financial holds), and how AI agents could soon automate tasks—if higher ed can untangle its data. Fresh off a $25 million investment, he also reveals Pathify’s expansion plans, the challenges of scaling a fully remote global team, and his hard-won advice for edtech founders: Persistence is the ultimate competitive advantage. From "Li...
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- [00:00]
A
A lot of the time it's just about centralizing and surfacing information intelligently and doing it in modern ways that consumers, end users expect and can have a really significant impact.
- [00:17]
B
Welcome to another episode of the EdTech Connect podcast where we strive to bring you the innovators in higher ed tech. And today I have a guest I've been looking forward to having for a long time. Chase Williams is the CEO and co Founder of pathify, a modern digital engagement platform that centralizes communication tasks and resources to improve student engagement and success. Launched in 2011, Pathfi serves nearly 250 higher ed institutions in five countries and earlier this year the company received a powerhouse $25 million growth investment from Five Elms Capital. Amidst growing tech and budget crises in higher ed, pathify is increasingly helping institutions consolidate and amplify essential technologies, services, resources and people into one modern interface, allowing institutions to simplify and optimize their tech stack. Addressing the challenges of duplicated work, costly integrations or development work, and the complexity of managing multiple engagement platforms, pathfind Engagement Hub ensures a cohesive experience across web and mobile, reducing overhead costs, enhancing the student digital experience Driven by dramatic outcomes, Pathfinder ranked repeatedly in the top 1000 of Inc 5000's fastest growing US companies list, validation of both its market impact and operational growth. Chase was recently featured in Forbes where he laid out the case for smarter tech consolidation in higher education. So welcome to the show. Chase. Great to have you here.
- [01:59]
A
Nice to meet you Jeff. Very happy to be here.
- [02:01]
B
Well, let's start off by talking about what led you to recognize the need for a unified student portal into found Pathfinder.
- [02:10]
A
We're starting to go back a little ways now. I say this all the time, but you can probably tell I'm not originally from the U.S. i'm from Melbourne, Australia. I actually went to the University of Oregon for a couple of years. My dad is from out of the west coast. But it wasn't until I was nearing the end of my degree at Monash University in Melbourne. Big school, many campuses, talking around 100,000 students, multi billion dollar turnover institution, and actually sat down with a few of my close friends at university, including my really good friend and co founder James McCullen. And I think that as we started to look at the issues we were having with our student experience at Monash, it just, it became very obvious that the digital experience with the portal that we were provided, the mobile app we were provided, was just very distinctly different from what we the experience we were getting in our everyday lives with say, an Instagram certainly, but also just like a YouTube or a Spotify. Those were tools that helped you connect with people or really like connect with a certain kind of information or content via music or video, say. And it was really easy to find a video or things were really personalized to you and you algorithmically surface things that you might be interested. Like if you go, you open the YouTube app right now, you can kind of within a few seconds you'll find something you want to watch because it knows you so well at this point. And so we contrasted that to logging into a portal at university where you were a student and maybe a bit more information about you, and then presented a bunch of links to other places. And that was the tool for navigating the student experience digitally, so to speak. So that's kind of that noticing that gap and that contrast is where it.
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B
All came from back when you did that. I'm trying to think what the space looked like. You know, there were portals out there. But the definition of a portal, like you were kind of one of the newer companies. What, what was different about what you were doing today and what was the landscape like?
- [04:21]
A
I think a portal is a good descriptor for what a traditional link farm portal is. You log in, you are single, signed on into other solutions in the background that you may need to access. But as soon as you click on one of those blue links, you are ported out to another place. So we, we just store all of these other everyday apps, turning that experience upside down where you log in and everything is brought to you. Not here's a web page, go find it. And so we, we looked at how can we introduce modern application functionality like search, like personalization based on knowing who you are through your user ID and your roles that you might have. And not just one role like student, but I'm a student that's an incoming freshman that lives at this campus and I'm in this residence hall and I play this sport and I'm interested in Harry Potter and what have you and being able to surface information on that basis. And then when it started to get really tricky was we began to learn how to big and complex and siloed and fragmented irate institutions are. And to try to connect and surface information across an institution like that was going to be a massive feat. And it actually wasn't until like 2018 when I met our CTO to met him in 2016 and randomly I met him outside of Tampa, Florida and he's from. He worked at Monash. I'd never met him when we were at Monash either. So Random Helbernian, out in the middle of kind of nowhere in Florida met him there and he convinced me over quite a few conversations that behind the single pane of glass front end that we have, you're going to need a middleware integration engine or layer to go into all of these other systems and transform that information from really outdated data formats into something that a newer front end can receive and service. So integration was a massive piece as well and is core to our vision because without that we can't surface information and personalize it to the student from across the digital ecosystem.
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B
So you integrate so many systems. I mean that's what a portal really needs to do. What's your strategy for avoiding digital overload?
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A
We think that the vision that we have in terms of being able to log into a single dashboard and present what's important from across your ecosystem really helps with digital overload in that there's less of a situation where you log into the portal and it's like where am I meant to go to go find this thing? And you start running down rabbit holes or going on like treasure hunts as we describe, without kind of knowing where you're going. So we think that helps reduce digital noise for the end user and particularly the student where they can come in and your service, the things you need today and a nudge towards what you're looking for. Candidly like thinking about it a little bit separately or differently if you're talking about digital overload because so much is brought into the hub. I mean it's one of the biggest problems that we will need to tackle as we continue working with institutions, is helping provide best practices from other institutions that are seeing really strong usage rates and really strong return rates to the platform and helping them understand how to like scaffold, like what's too much noise, what's, you know, if you hand over permissions to the announcements module in our platform to too many people across campus, you're just going to get people hammering students and they're going to turn off the notifications and leave the app. So that, that's a big part of like that white glove, high level customer experience around a platform like this is really important. We.
- [08:23]
B
Yeah, and you talked about Link Farm early on. That's how I. That's the old portal, right? Just a bunch of single sign on links, if that, you know, and now we evolved to this, you know, almost portal is almost the outdated term now. Student engagement hub or whatever you call it. That's How I see what you've evolved to is where do affiliated people log in to get their stuff? So it's a real test and personalization. Right. So can you walk us through a standout case where colleges have transformed student engagement with pathfi?
- [08:51]
A
Yeah, we sort of look at it in two ways. I think Pacific is a really good example because you can see it on both sides where they took 29 systems and brought it down to five. And we were one of the core systems as part of that five to bring down all of these solutions and centralize not just a lot of information, but a lot of different workflows for administrators and students. And portals didn't necessarily, in a vanity metric way have a usage issue or engagement issue, if that makes sense. You kind of got to go there to get to everything else, but it's just more around the return metrics. And what are some of the things that we can look at at Pacific? They from the year before using Pathfinder to the year after instituting it and they created a specific role around students who had not yet taken off a financial hole before starting the fall semester, I think it was. And they sent out that they created that role. And based on the students that had that role, they added a task or a nudge which was like you need to pay or take off this financial hold and pay this bill before X date. And the holds came down by 85% compared to the year before. And it's just, it really is like, it's a useful example in this kind of environment to use because it just speaks to a lot of the time. It's just about centralizing and surfacing information intelligently and doing it in modern ways that consumers, end users expect and can have a really significant impact. So I think that's a good. Like the portals haven't had an engagement issue, but like an impact issue is. Is what they've had and that's an impact example.
- [10:39]
B
What's been the most surprising piece of feedback from students using pathify?
- [10:45]
A
This is more just like coming to the top of my head while we're on here, but there's really two sides of our platform. The everyday, popular, everyday applications better connect us with information and content. They also better connect us with people and people in different circles. And we have those two sides to our platform. The, the community module of our platform, the part where you connect with people and support and services and advisors that are relevant to your experience happens in our platform. And given how commoditized people to people connection has become like you still have a lot of students still log into groupmeet before they come in and join an institution or they're obviously connecting. They can connect through WhatsApp and other places. And I have been surprised at the success we've had in institution run communities where they can take roles and automatically have students join. And then we'll hear these anecdotes from someone that might be a student on the student representative council or a student worker that's helping implement the platform. And they're like, we didn't have anyone really turning up to this volleyball game before we started hosting this event and had this at a volleyball group in the platform. And all of a sudden we have like many more people turning up to like a particular sports game or different events and things like that. I'm always given how commoditized like community tools have become. That one continues to surprise me. When we hear, when we hear those anecdotes, it's like, oh, okay, people are actually hearing about that and going and taking action.
- [12:27]
B
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- [12:32]
A
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- [12:57]
B
I'm interested in how, how you connect with these legacy systems like Sass and LMSS. I remember PeopleSoft have their own portal that never really took off. They've been around for a while. Like a lot of schools are stuck with them. Where do they fall short? And what does a great integration look like with these systems?
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A
Yeah, and this is where it starts to get nuanced in terms of the definition of a portal, because there are instances of SIS portals that we don't really view as like the traditional portal. The traditional portal is that link farm. Like, hey, it may have been offered as an appendage to the sis and it's a separate module that you can purchase. Or an institution really just like spun up a webpage with SSO around it and made a bunch of links and very little personalization, no search. And like that's out of all the lms, the CRM, the sis, the financial aid system, the academic planning, these all have their own interfaces and they kind of have their own portals in terms of how people are like traditionally, you know, if you go to the doctor, they might have a medical portal that you go on and pay your bill on. Right. We kind of think of ourselves as like the single pane of glass for all your portals and information. Like we're taking this sis, CRM, lms, financial aid system, degree planning, all your calendars that might be in different departments, departments that are relevant to you. We're going and getting them and pulling on them and bringing them to one place. So it can get a little like nuanced around the edges of what the SIS has a portal. What do you mean? Like, why do we need you guys? Well, the SIS has a lot of information, but it has a proportion of the information and activities going on across the institution. There are way more systems now and way more activity that's happening, like even on the academic and co curricular side that isn't captured in the sas. So there's that piece of it. But when it comes to actually integrating, this is where the integration layer comes in, where we have two sides of the integration layer out of the box integrations, we call them recipes, that have been built with all the different popular SISs, all of the different popular LMSs and so on. As you look at different systems in the space and each of the sass have different ways of connecting. Like if you look at PeopleSoft from Oracle, there's not a set of APIs that you can go and connect to there. The institution themselves needs to have built like a set of API connections around the outside of that or web services. And so we let you plug your web service that you've built on the outside of PeopleSoft to our solution. Whereas when it comes to like Ellucian Ethos or Ellucian Cloud, connect that up directly with the recipe that we have. Same as like a Canvas API. But when it comes to something like calendars, you might have a calendar in one department running on RSS, you might have another calendar running on iCal, you might have another calendar. We can go pull a JSON feed off, we take those, we can transform them into an iCal and then pass that to our front end which can receive ICAL only. And that's where it's like the integration layer is much a data format transformer as anything.
- [16:20]
B
Yeah, that's the core of what I think sounds like makes it useful. Looking ahead, what emerging tech like AI or digital wallets, what excites you most about higher ed and new tech?
- [16:32]
A
I feel like there's a lot of AI agents of what's very buzzy at the moment. And you've got MCP and everything that surrounds that. I'm excited in terms of our position and our ability to execute on an AI taking or executing on tasks on your behalf. Whether it's one or a series of two or three tasks within our chat interface because we connect to the data at a really fundamental level and at a pretty sophisticated way. There's a lot of talk about agents in and around the space and it all comes back to the data and the ability. Like how sensical is the data? Do you have access to it in order to carry out a task where you just even booking an advisor appointment or enrolling in a course? There are so many different pieces of data that need to be made sense of and connected to as part of those kinds of actions that not only I think we're a little ways off that in higher ed, but it's going to require someone who's like deeply understands the data and how to connect that and make sense of it for those agents to operate in any reliable way. Because if you think about the ability for an agent to hallucinate if they're wrong 5% of the time on one operation and then it's 5%, you having them do a series of tasks that 5% just compounds and compounds and compounds are pretty, pretty soon it becomes relatively useless.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:11]
A
So yeah, that is exciting and what that can do for user experiences in the industry. And I'm just excited about our position to be able to execute on that. We're going to have to head in that direction.
- [18:24]
B
You've recently received $25 million investment from Five Homes Capital, which is exciting. How will that fuel your roadmap very.
- [18:33]
A
Much product in new regions. So we're embarking on opening the UK and parts of the EU here over the next six to 12 months, which I think is, is exciting for us. And then it is very much on pushing further into the AI side and the integration side and building up that team. It's always important when you take on new investment not to forget about the platform and the things you were doing that got you there and start to focus on the new shiny strategies and objectives. So we've been pretty diligent or focused on, okay, let's, let's pick three kind of things we're going to do. But then also continue to invest in growing the existing team and making sure the account management team and that customer experience team grows with us so we can continue to have the same level of customer experience and support. That's the kind of stuff that can get forgotten about pretty easily when you raise a bunch of cash.
- [19:31]
B
You're a global company, you're fully remote. How do you nurture Pathify's Culture across continents.
- [19:41]
A
Yeah, we have gotten quite used to it. I mean I think we're trying to use the best of both worlds. So I think you have kind of come to believe that you are better operationally from home where it's less distraction. Here's my to do list. Let me get things done. And you're much better strategically in terms of planning when you're together. And there's also the component of you just you need in person, human connection every so often to build the culture and then really maintain it as well. So we get together like teams of ours get together and we get together as a company at least every quarter. So we do a big end of year get together but at the same time teams themselves are getting together and making sure they're doing that both in local senses. And then we're just. This year we've got the, our exec level and our operations management level. We're bringing over like a number of a couple of VPs from Australia as well for the first time which will be fun. So we use that and we also use events to get together. We'll often bring people from different teams to our events. So when we go to educors, bring devs along as well who put their hand up and say like I want to get involved, I want to see what it's like for us on the ground. And we use those as opportunities to continue to build the culture and have fun. But it's hard.
- [21:07]
B
Any of our listeners, if anyone's at educause, go check out pathfi because they always, they're not hard to find. Like they're always a great, a great place to hang out and come to happy hours. What early lessons have you learned from building pathify and what stuck as it scaled?
- [21:28]
A
A lot of lessons from the journey. I mean I think the biggest one is it will be slower than you think it will be unless you are riding a rocket ship. And a lot of the time that's just like timing and luck. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, like maybe they get into it and they expect it to be quicker. Those that I've known and seen like over the last five, 10, 15 years that sort of grown up alongside as a company, the ones that have been most successful, it's kind of, it's a marathon type angle on, on your business.
- [22:03]
B
Persistence, perseverance is the lesson.
- [22:06]
A
I guess it is for sure. But it's also like not being distracted by too many things. One of the biggest, like again you raise money, you have like your own shiny, different Initiatives that you want to take on and remembering what got you there. And it's like, it's incremental. Sometimes you need to make big bets. You get put in a spot whether it's competitive or it might be something at the macro level you can't control. You need to make bigger bets. That happens, but just in terms of like slow, steady growth, persistent attendance to. It's kind of like compound interest. Right. So sort of starts to grow and it can balloon over time. And I think that's. That's what's happening with us.
- [22:44]
B
I love your take on. You've talked to a lot of higher ed leaders. How do you advise higher ed to evaluate vendor partnerships beyond the slick demo?
- [22:56]
A
Yeah, I mean, always back channel and speak to speak to customers, anyone in higher ed. Like, it's a big market, but it's also a very small market center. Like all of the CIOs. Like, if you go on LinkedIn, you're going to be connected to at least 100 of them and probably 20 of our customers. And same with a different vendor. Go talk to other people. That's what you've got to do. Same with hiring on our side.
- [23:20]
B
I always say higher ed likes to be on the leading edge, but not the bleeding edge. Like, they always want to see what their peers are doing. And, you know, you're so much in better spot if you use those references that you have from your happy customers.
- [23:34]
A
Yeah.
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B
So for aspiring edtech founders, what's the biggest lesson from your journey with Pathify?
- [23:41]
A
I mean, I think you probably said it. It just is. It's persistence. It's a marathon, continued dedication. Kind of a boring answer, but that's the kind of truth.
- [23:52]
B
Hey, they got to hear it over and over. A lot of my guests say that you just gotta not get distracted and. And persevere. Well, Chase, it was great having you on the show. I'm going to put links to pathfinder and Chase's LinkedIn bio in the show notes. So thanks for being here.
- [24:08]
A
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
- [24:11]
B
As we wrap up this episode, remember EdTech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech impact implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content for even more resources and connections. Head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for EdTech review trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.