Kempus wants to be the ultimate app for sharing college hacks

Remember poring over reviews on Rate My Professors to find out which prof is good-looking and who gives easy As? The professor and class ratings site is one of the few web 1.0 sites that are still well and alive today. When the portal was acquired by news streaming service Chedder in 2018, it boasted a monthly user base of 6 million.

Its long-lasting relevance impressed Jae Lee, a South Korean serial entrepreneur educated in the U.S. and living in Singapore, but the site is nowhere near perfection. Identities aren't verified, for instance, so there's no way to vet the validity of reviews. After all, students see it more as an "entertaining" site rather than something serious that they base their course decisions on, Lee suggests in an interview.

Nonetheless, the popularity of ratemyprofessors.com signals students' need for a place where they can help each other out with their college experience. Lee and his co-founder Danny Woo thus set out to build Kempus, an anonymous online community for U.S. college students.

Specifically, Kempus aims to create a reservoir of knowledge to help students reach their ultimate goal, in Lee's words, "the upstream of getting a college degree." That knowledge, or what the founder calls "a unique dataset within higher education," can range from professor ratings to tips for buying second-hand textbooks, housing reviews and how to get counseling on campus.

"We are democratizing the level of access to information, which starts with course reviews," says Lee.

Incorporated in August 2022, Kempus recently raised $3 million in a seed round from Bithumb Korea, a major cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea, though the founder says the company has no plans to associate itself with cryptocurrencies.

The reason for taking money from Bithumb, according to Lee, is that Kempus is fundamentally a data business, so "we chose to pitch our idea to a seed investor who had prior investments relevant to a data-driven business, including but not limited to blockchain, under their portfolio."