What is Vedai and why are we doing it?
Vedai is an education crowd investment platform. The main reason we’re creating Vedai is to enable more people to get access to high quality educational opportunities, which aligns with the Collective Intelligence Labs mission — helping realize the full potential of humanity with the help of collective intelligence technologies.
Crowd investing is a novel investment mechanism as it allows anyone, no matter what their background and financial opportunities are, to become an investor. It’s somewhat similar to crowdfunding, with a difference that here people get a financial return. Vedai enables companies and individuals to invest in the education of other people, specifically into their ISAs, and derive profit from the graduates’ future income.
Income Share Agreements (ISA) are a contract through which a student receives funding for study in exchange for a fixed percentage of their future income. An ISA provider pays for the course that the student takes, and in return the student contractually agrees to pay the provider a percentage of their salary for a set period of time in the future.
Learn more about ISAs:
- TechCrunch: How income share agreements will spark the rise of career accelerators
- Yahoo Finance: Income share agreements: Assessing the latest big idea for fixing the U.S. student loan crisis
- Forbes: Are income-share agreements a good idea?
- MarketWatch: What is an income share agreement? What college students need to know about this type of student loan
Two things make us think we’re heading in the right direction:
Student debt crisis in the US
- Totals $1.71 trillion today and is growing six times faster than the nation’s economy
- 45.3 million student borrowers are in debt by an average of $37,691 each
- There’s a huge demand for education which is stifled financially for many people
Students take loans, adding to the student debt crisis
- Many education institutions are providing financial aid to students, but are naturally limited in the funding they can provide
Vedai brings value to all of its future users:
For investors, Vedai is a way to transform others’ lives, while diversifying their portfolio — investing in passive income.
For students, it’s a chance to start a professional career and change their life for the better without carrying a heavy burden of traditional loans.
62% of Americans consider money as the main barrier to advancing or switching careers
30% of Americans have considered making a career change since starting their first job
For educational institutions, Vedai is a tool to enrol more students.
We believe Vedai will help thousands of people to change their lives and access high quality educational opportunities they could not even think of before.
In the next articles we will share product hypotheses we’re currently testing for Vedai, and also show some functionality we’ve developed for the past couple of months. Stay tuned!
