Denver, CO - Scholarly, an AI-native faculty lifecycle platform for higher education, today announced it has raised $3M in growth capital from existing investors Bienville Capital and Range Ventures. The investment follows a year in which the company reached cash-flow breakeven while growing revenue over 600% year-over-year - a combination that made a compelling case for strategic investment to accelerate growth.

"This may be the last capital we ever need to raise," said Rusty Cowher, CEO and Co-Founder of Scholarly. "We've been cash-flow breakeven for the past year. But when you're seeing the kind of demand we're seeing from leading higher ed institutions, additional investment in our agentic AI capabilities and scaling the team for enterprise implementations is the right move - and our investors agreed."

The company has supported over 15,000 faculty activity reports, promotion and tenure cases, and sabbatical applications on the platform and serves a diverse portfolio of institutions including large R1 research universities, regional publics, academic medical institutions, and small liberal arts colleges. That breadth of adoption across institution types has validated the platform's flexibility and reinforced market demand for modern, agentic AI faculty infrastructure.

"Scholarly is the first agentic AI platform for higher ed faculty - one of the major operational functions in higher education still running on spreadsheets, binders, and brittle legacy systems, and exactly the kind of category where AI-native infrastructure wins," said Adam Burrows, Co-Founder & Managing Director at Range Ventures. "Their ambition is to be the market leader and fundamentally define what agentic AI infrastructure looks like for higher education, and they're earning the right to do it: a beloved product, 100% customer retention, and cash-flow breakeven while scaling rapidly. We couldn't be more excited to keep backing one of the most innovative teams in the industry."

The new capital will be directed toward accelerating product development, expanding the company's operations and customer success teams, and scaling go-to-market efforts to serve more institutions. 

"Higher education deserves modern, agentic AI platforms for managing operations, and that's exactly what we offer," Cowher added. "We're building the system of record and the system of action for faculty affairs - evaluations, promotion and tenure, CV management, faculty activity reporting, credential management, and research benchmarking - and institutions are telling us this category is long overdue for new infrastructure."

Scholarly's platform replaces fragmented legacy systems and manual workflows with a unified, AI-powered platform purpose-built for faculty, deans, provosts, and faculty affairs offices. The company has maintained 100% client retention since its founding.

About Scholarly

Scholarly is an AI-native faculty lifecycle platform that modernizes how colleges and universities manage faculty data and workflows. From AI-powered CV import and faculty activity reporting to configurable promotion and tenure workflows and streamlined data management, Scholarly gives institutions the tools to improve operations and make better, faster decisions about their most important asset - their faculty.