On Wednesday, March 19th, Parchment announced that it had closed a $10M round which brings the EdTech company’s total funding to $45M. This announcement further proves that the company is doing important, useful work. That work entails probably the least sexy aspect of education: transcript and other paper-based document management. In-fact, it almost seems that the nature of managing transcripts, and other such monotonous tasks, makes any solution that much more worthwhile.

In the company’s own words:

Parchment enables individuals and organizations to collect, analyze, use, and share the data currently locked in their paper-based education credentials. Once unlocked, data can be actionable in powerful ways that improve educational access, attainment, and career opportunities.¹

Essentially, Parchment partners with Registrars at universities across the country to issue transcripts and other paper documents electronically. On the other end of the service, “Parchment Receive members collect credentials from multiple issuers and individuals, streamline operations and access analytics.”² Not only does this save a tremendous amount of time for everyone involved, but it saves a whole bunch of money.

A recent Wall Street Journal article gave an anecdotal account of Michael L. Rendon’s daily experience as the University Registrar of Texas A&M, Corpus Christi. According to the article, Rendon’s office would hand process “100 to 300 transcript requests a day for students and alumni applying to other schools, jobs or for insurance,” during high-volume periods.³ Needless to say, hand processing 100-300 transcripts is an unbearably mundane and tedious task. However, the University recently adopted Parchment’s platform. The benefits have been pretty impressive: “with the help of a Scottsdale, Ariz. company called Parchment Inc., Texas A&M now sends transcripts digitally, saving about $60,000 a year, and countless man-hours”.⁴ The Texas A&M story is but one example of the rapid adoption rate of Parchment’s platform; the company currently works with north of  5,500 educational institutions nationwide. The overall statistics are incredible.

The company facilitated the exchange of more than 1.8 million credentials in Q4 2013 alone, and more than five million credentials over the trailing twelve months, boasting an increase of 59% from year prior. Additionally, the number of new consumer registrations on Parchment services increased by 90% over the same period, jumping from more than 800,000 registrants to nearly 1.6 million.⁵

That is some serious traction. When you hear the Parchment team talk about their work, it is instantly clear that they truly love it. Take a look at the short video below: “The Parchment Story: How eTranscript exchange is changing education”