Our Story

In seventh grade Karan Goel made money by buying chewing gum wholesale from Sam's Club and reselling it to his classmates. When he advanced to selling pizza by the slice—an alternative to school lunches—administrators saw a decline in school profits and shut him down. In eighth grade, he started an internet site that aggregated news and movie reviews for teens. The site became one of the most popular sites on the web at the time, and a local venture capitalist approached Karan and said "Pitch me". He was hooked on entrepreneurship.

At his high school in Ohio, Karan noticed that many of his fellow classmates were taking courses or hiring private tutors to prepare for the SAT. After skimming through a copy of The Official SAT Study Guide, he decided to self-study, betting his mom a 1500+ score in exchange for the money she would have spent enrolling him in a course. He won the bet and scored a 1530 on his SAT I. Not to mention, he also scored a perfect 800 on four SAT II exams and perfect 5s on all eleven of his AP exams.

Karan graduated from the University of Chicago in three years with honors. Despite the fact that most MBAs start business school in their mid-twenties, Karan applied to the Booth School of Business (the #1 business school in America according to Businessweek) at age 20 and was accepted—the youngest in his class. While at Booth, he tapped into his entrepreneurial spirit and his know-how of standardized tests to create PrepMe, with the belief that every student deserves a personalized learning experience.

"Companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review have spent the last thirty years focusing on traditional classroom learning. It's an outdated model. PrepMe knows that every student is different, and we believe that personalized online learning tailored to individual student's needs is the future of education. That's our mission," answered Karan in response to questions from business plan judges at the 2005 New Venture Challenge. PrepMe went on to win top prize in this competition, giving the idea promise. Following its win, PrepMe was entered into the 2005 FORTUNE Small Business Magazine Student Showdown, a business plan competition openly only to prior business plan competition winners—sort of like a World Series of Business Plan competitions. Beating out over 80 teams, PrepMe again won top prize, which included a cover story on the front of FORTUNE Small Business Magazine. With close to $100K in seed money, PrepMe officially launches its SAT, ACT, and PSAT online programs to the world.

Businessweek takes notice, as the magazine names the youthful PrepMe team one of its "Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25" for 2006. More importantly, the PrepMe movement grows strong, as students from all across the US and abroad begin enrolling. Within a year of launch, the company has students from all of the seven continents except Antarctica (Update: we are still waiting for a student from Antarctica.).

One small step for Maine, one giant leap for all of its high school Juniors. In 2007, governor of Maine John Baldacci announced that the state had partnered with PrepMe to provide over $4.5MM in online test preparation to Maine's public high school Juniors. Maine took the bold step of replacing its assessment test with the SAT because it believed that every student deseved to have access to a college education and with the partnership, it gave over 120,000 students access to PrepMe's personalized online SAT program.

PrepMe launches the Precocious Program, a version of its online courses designed specifically for bright, young middle school students. The program, targeted at the group of over 150,000 middle school students who take the SAT or ACT each year, helps 6th to 8th graders prepare early for exams and earn entrance into summer gifted programs such as Duke's Talent Identification Program (TIP) and Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth (CTY) program. Within 24 hours, the program has its first student. In that same year, PrepMe is selected as one of ten winners of the 2008 Chicago Innovation Awards. The company is recognized alongside giants such as Abbott Labs and the American Red Cross.

After four years of helping students all across the globe, PrepMe lands its 25,000th student! Additionally, as standardized tests become more pervasive not only in the college admissions process but aslo in state standards testing, we launch a Schools Division to bring PrepMe into every classroom in America.

Our logo graduates from a simple mortarboard logo to a nifty green logo. The logo change reflects a change in direction for our company. No longer simply a test preparation company, PrepMe has turned into a prominent brand in the education industry, with a continued goal of bringing high-quality, personalized learning to each and every student. Truth be told, we're just getting started!