Justin Wenig

Co-Founder & CEO Starbridge

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Justin Wenig has built two companies around the same insight approached from opposite ends: that public institutions run on software nobody has bothered to modernise, and that selling into them is harder than it should be. The first, Coursedog, began as an undergraduate frustration — he and a classmate could not take the computer science courses they wanted because the timetables clashed — and became an academic operations platform used by hundreds of universities including Stanford, Columbia and CUNY, raising a reported $113 million in equity and taking a $90 million growth investment from JMI Equity in 2023. He left Columbia without finishing his degree to build it and stepped back from the chief executive role in 2024. The second, Starbridge, sells to the vendors rather than the institutions: a go-to-market intelligence platform that monitors buying signals, public spending and procurement activity across government and education, and uses AI to find and pursue contracts in a market Wenig describes as opaque and inefficient. It has grown from five customers in early 2025 to more than 600 by mid-2026, on $52 million raised across a seed and a Craft Ventures-led Series A.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Coursedog in 2018 with fellow Columbia student Nicholas Diao and led it as chief executive until 2024.
• Grew Coursedog to serve 200 to 300-plus higher-education institutions, including Stanford, Columbia and CUNY, on a reported $113 million of equity funding.
• Secured a $90 million strategic growth investment for Coursedog from JMI Equity in March 2023.
• Handed the Coursedog chief executive role to Andrew Rosen in June 2024, remaining a co-founder.
• Co-founded Starbridge in 2024 as a go-to-market intelligence platform for companies selling into government and education.
• Raised a $10 million seed for Starbridge in Q1 2025 and a $42 million Series A led by Craft Ventures in Q3 2025.
• Scaled Starbridge from five customers and eight staff in early 2025 to more than 600 customers and over 90 employees by Q2 2026.
• Founded Overture, an accelerator for Columbia student and alumni founders, and serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Columbia Entrepreneurship.

Professional Journey

Wenig’s first company came out of a scheduling problem. Heading into the spring of their junior year at Columbia, he and his friend Nicholas Diao found that the computer science classes they wanted to take ran at the same times — a familiar undergraduate annoyance, but one that reflects a genuine operational failure inside universities, where course scheduling, catalogue management and curriculum approval often still run on decades-old student information systems and spreadsheets. They founded Coursedog in 2018 to fix it. Wenig did not finish his degree; Columbia’s own entrepreneurship office describes him as a Columbia College dropout who would have been class of 2019.

Coursedog grew quickly into a broader academic operations platform, moving beyond scheduling into catalogue, curriculum and space management. It raised $4.2 million in 2020, $17 million subsequently, and in March 2023 a $90 million strategic growth investment from JMI Equity — a round large enough to reset the company’s ambitions, and one of the more significant investments in higher-education software that year. By that point Coursedog counted more than 200 institutional partners including Stanford, Columbia and CUNY, with total equity funding reported at $113 million. In June 2024 the company appointed Andrew Rosen as chief executive, with Wenig, still a co-founder, publicly welcoming him. Coursedog has continued independently, acquiring ClassRanked in 2026.

Starbridge came directly out of what Wenig learned selling Coursedog. Six years of pursuing higher-education contracts gave him a close view of how public-sector procurement actually works — which is to say, slowly, opaquely, and with the buying signals scattered across board minutes, budget documents, RFP portals and public spending records that no vendor has the time to read. Starbridge, which he co-founded in 2024, aggregates that material and applies AI to it: monitoring buying signals, enriching contact and company data, surfacing public spend intelligence, and discovering and drafting responses to RFPs. He frames the addressable opportunity as a $2 trillion market and the problem as one of transparency and speed rather than relationships.

The company’s growth has been unusually steep. Starbridge closed a $10 million seed round in the first quarter of 2025 backed by StoryHouse Ventures, Owl Ventures, Autotech Ventures, Avalanche VC and Commonweal Ventures, with five customers and an eight-person founding team. A $42 million Series A led by Craft Ventures followed in the third quarter of the same year. By the second quarter of 2026 the company reported more than 600 customers and over 90 employees. Wenig frames the work in civic terms, arguing that the largest benefits of AI ought to be felt in the institutions and communities where people actually live and learn, and that infrastructure is what makes that possible.

Alongside the operating work he has stayed close to where he started. He founded Overture, an invitation-only accelerator for Columbia students and recent alumni building startups, which provides mentorship and a $10,000 initial investment, and he serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Columbia Entrepreneurship — a role he holds despite, or perhaps because of, never having taken a degree there.

Education

Columbia University, Columbia College

Attended; left without completing a degree, in what would have been the class of 2019. He departed to build Coursedog full time. No degree from any institution was found in any public source, and an earlier version of this profile incorrectly recorded a Columbia bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics.