00:00:00 · Leon Li, Vansh Langer, Krish Bajaj, Michelle Kwok, Michael Nogen
[00:00:00] S0: For Coeus Collective and NYU Stern School of Business, Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship, I'm Leon Li. [00:00:05] S1: And I'm Vansh Langer Langer This is Capital Calling, where founders step into the spotlight to face real investors, real feedback, and a real opportunity for investment. [00:00:14] S0: Now let's meet our founder. [00:00:16] S1: Joining the call today is Krish Bajaj of Roam, who realized moving abroad is supposed to be exciting, not exhausting. He's built a platform that brings together all the essentials for international students in one place. So the only thing they stress about is choosing their dorm here. Will he answer the call? We'll find out. [00:00:31] S0: But first, let's meet the investors. Krish, capital is calling. Do you have what it takes to redefine home? [00:00:43] S2: Hi. I'm Krish, a former international student, recent NYU grad, and the founder of Roam. [00:00:49] S3: Hi. I'm Michelle. I'm an investor at Draper Associates. We're a generalist investor. We love to invest frontier tech anywhere from pre seed to series a, but we love to stay at the seed stage. [00:01:00] S4: Hi. Michael Nogen. I'm an investor at Overton Venture Capital. Pre seed, seed stage fund. We're really focused on this evolving consumer, so we're generalists by nature. For us, it's all... It's really about the founders and being, like, opportunistic.
00:01:00 · Michael Nogen, Vansh Langer
[00:01:00] S4: Hi. Michael Nogen. I'm an investor at Overton Venture Capital. Pre seed, seed stage fund. We're really focused on this evolving consumer, so we're generalists by nature. For us, it's all... It's really about the founders and being, like, opportunistic. [00:01:16] S5: And I'm Vansh Langer. I am a venture partner at Pioneer Fund, mainly a y combinator based seed fund, but we do other we do other investments, you know, very general, so anything from fintech to health care. Glad to meet you.
00:01:30 · Krish Bajaj
[00:01:30] S2: Every year, 7,000,000 students cross borders to study abroad. But for most of them, the hardest part is not getting accepted. It's starting their lives in a new country. Opening a bank account, setting up insurance, finding housing, paying tuition, every step of the process is fragmented across different systems, currencies, and providers. This fragmentation doesn't just create stress for students, it causes universities to miss out on potential enrollments, forces service providers to operate in silos, and leaves billions of dollars of value trapped between disconnected systems, effectively constraining the sector's ability to scale. At Roam, we're fixing that. We are building the operating system for global student mobility. An ecosystem that connects students, service providers, and universities with each other throughout the entire process. Our model unfolds over four sequential phases, aggregate, distribute, operate, and integrate. Each one of these phases solves a critical problem for a key stakeholder in this space. Let's begin with aggregate. When I first came to NYU in 2021, took me and every other international student I know close to three weeks to get set up with the bare essentials. We're talking about a bank account, SIM card and insurance, not to mention the $5,000 spent on doing so. So I started Roam. Today, we've built the world's most comprehensive marketplace for international student services. With 40 different partners in 10 different verticals, any student can get set up with everything they need to start their lives in a new country from the comfort of their own home while saving tons of time, loads of stress and thousands of dollars along the way. This brings me to phase two, distribute. To channel students to the marketplace, we knew we had to get to them before they left home. So we acquired a distribution network of 3,700 study abroad aggregators across South Asia. That gives us access to close to 70% of students leaving the subcontinent, allows us to reach them with our products and services on the marketplace before they leave, effectively giving service providers who work with us early access to students and helping bridge the gap between them getting set up and them studying abroad. Once we built this expansive distribution, we attracted the attention of several institutions, including a few governments.
00:03:58 · Krish Bajaj, Vansh Langer
That brings me to phase three, operate. We launched a subscription based service to capitalize on this access we'd built called global access, wherein any entity that subscribes, we build and operate local teams for them to push their products and services through to students through our distribution network on their behalf, effectively giving them local market access in a matter of months... In a matter of days instead of months or years. Coming to phase four, which is integrate. Now that we've aligned students, service providers, and institutions alike, it's time to natively offer services that are currently constraining the industry. The two most problematic, the two biggest problems we've seen students suffer with are finding housing and making international payments. So we're currently at the phase where going forward, we're natively offering these solutions directly through our platform, unlocking tremendous value for everyone involved in this space. Together, these four phases lay the foundation for the world's first truly connected ecosystem for international education, one that transforms how students move, how universities grow, how service providers scale, and how global education operates. That's Roam. [00:05:15] S5: That's great. What's your traction look like?
00:05:15 · Vansh Langer, Krish Bajaj, Michelle Kwok
[00:05:15] S5: That's great. What's your traction look like? [00:05:18] S2: We have traction by phase, so I'll start over there. With the marketplace, we've helped about 7,500 students relocate, not just to The US, it includes UK, Australia, all of Europe as well. So that's going well. The number of partners grows by about five or so every month. We currently cover banking, cellular, insurance, taxes, visas, loans, travel, food, jobs, housing. Virtually anything a student could require to start their life in a new country, we can assist them with. On distribution, we have access, like I mentioned, about 70% of all students leaving the subcontinent. India being the largest source market and the surrounding regions included in that, We have one of the largest educational focused distribution networks on the planet. When it comes to operate, our most recent contract that we signed, I'll give you three of them. One was with the government of Western Australia to distribute their curriculum to high schools in India to create a very strong pipeline of students going to Australia given the geopolitical environment with the rest of the world. Second was with Cambridge University to distribute their materials and academic resources again to schools across South Asia. And third was with HSBC, the global bank, to open bank accounts for students studying anywhere in the world and streamlining payment and money movement for these students wherever they choose to go. [00:06:44] S3: So what's the business model? Is it the partners pay you to be on the platform?
00:06:44 · Michelle Kwok, Krish Bajaj
[00:06:44] S3: So what's the business model? Is it the partners pay you to be on the platform? [00:06:48] S2: So we have three revenue streams. First is affiliate revenue. Partners pay us to be on the platform and we get a cut per student that converts. Second is we trade in commodities like SIM cards and any product on this platform that can be traded, we keep a margin and we move it in bulk. And third, we have subscription revenue coming in from global access, which is the model through which we work with institutions to give them access to the local [00:07:15] S3: So are you a services business right now? [00:07:16] S2: Yes, we're a services business right now. [00:07:18] S3: So what's your strongest revenue stream? And could you share numbers?