Argus.ai
Agentic admissions: unlocking global talent
"the future of talent systems is about creating a nervous system that surfaces the right signals at the right moment."
Michael Weiler, Founder/CEO
michael@argus.ai
Summer 2025
Problem
College admissions teams are overwhelmed, understaffed, and under pressure
Admissions teams are struggling:
Manual processes and repetitive tasks, outdated legacy technology, surging applicant volumes, and reduced signal from test-optional and post-affirmative-action policies.
Outsourced seasonal readers aren't the answer:
Hiring external readers each cycle is inefficient and yields inconsistent results, yet colleges rely on them to manage applicant volumes.
Pressure to Cut Costs—But Fear of Losing Revenue:
Universities urgently need budget cuts, yet they’re hesitant to trim admissions spending because it directly impacts enrollment—the main driver of institutional revenue.
Admissions as usual isn't sustainable; institutions urgently need a scalable solution that preserves revenue while cutting costs.
Opportunity
Admissions staffing is expensive and inefficient—replacing seasonal readers is only the start
External seasonal readers (entry wedge):
Colleges spend $100M+ annually on seasonal readers—an expenditure that only made sense when there wasn't an alternative.
Internal admissions teams (broader market):
Institutions spend over $4B annually on internal admissions staff - bloated by highly manual, repetitive evaluation processes that still can’t handle surging application volumes.
Argus has a solution:
Argus’s AI admissions workers scale admissions capacity, dramatically reduce staffing costs, and provide consistent evaluations—allowing universities to safely cut admissions spend without risking enrollment revenue.
Argus agentic admissions enables strategic cost-cutting, while preserving essential revenue AND improving outcomes.
Why now
Higher education is getting hammered—
creating a unique window for Argus
Post-COVID upheaval:
COVID accelerated declining enrollments, intensified financial pressures, and permanently shifted student behaviors and expectations.
Test-optional admissions:
The rapid shift to test-optional policies removed traditional evaluation signals, overwhelming admissions teams and forcing colleges to seek alternatives.
Demographic cliff approaching:
The imminent demographic decline in college-aged students is intensifying institutional competition.
New federal animosity:
Increased federal scrutiny and hostility toward admissions practices and uncertainty around federal research spending makes budget efficiency a critical priority for institutions for the first time in decades.
The higher ed admissions status quo is imploding—at exactly the right time for agentic AI to takeover.
Team
The right team to reshape admissions:
Michael Weiler, Founder/CEO:
Created Edupath (#1 mobile college research app); led innovation at Udacity.
Sam De Roeck, Technical Lead:
Principal architect behind Argus's matching engine; Meta; previously SingleStore, M10 Networks.
Don Yu, Advisor:
Former Chief Strategy/Product Officer, Scholarship America; COO, CommonApp.
Marten Roorda, Advisor:
Former ACT CEO; Gates Foundation senior advisor, scaling expert.
Deep expertise in AI, assessment innovation, and personalized student guidance.
Market
Agentic admissions is the wedge that unlocks automating college admissions
Stage 1 - 2: Admissions Staffing (~$4B):
Argus's AI admissions coworkers are initially trained by universities to evaluate existing applicants and address current workflow and budgetary pressures. But what happens when our agents proactively identify and match target students who haven't yet applied—enabling institutions - and students - to bypass the traditional application process entirely?
Admissions automation enables Argus to go after the following additional university spend:
Stage 3: International Admissions Market (~$2B):
U.S. colleges pay recruiting agents approximately 10–15% of first-year tuition, representing roughly $2B annually
Stage 3: Domestic Admissions & Marketing Spend ($1.5B+)
Institutions spend over $1.5B - $2.5B annually on domestic student lead generation, marketing, and recruitment
Stage 4: CRM & Admissions Software Spend (Additional ~$1B):
Institutions spend approximately $1B annually on CRM software, application-management systems, and related enrollment workflow management tools, that quickly become obsolete when the workflow is automated
Agentic admissions positions Argus to automate a multi-billion-dollar addressable market.
How it works (stage 1 - 2)
Argus admissions agents integrate into existing admissions workflows - no new software to learn
Automated & Scalable Applicant Evaluations:
Argus evaluates, annotates, ranks, and prioritizes thousands of applicants, proactively gathers missing applicant information, and delivers clear, actionable insights to admissions teams.
One-Time Training on Historical Data:
Argus is trained on up to 10 years of historical applicant data—often fragmented across spreadsheets—to precisely replicate institutional evaluation criteria.
Remote Team Member Interaction:
Admissions teams interact with their Argus agent just like any remote staff member, communicating via Slack and email for frictionless adoption.
CRM-Agnostic Integration:
Argus integrates into existing admissions processes, completely agnostic to institutional CRM or application management systems.
Argus is the 100x hire for every admission team.
How it works (stage 1 - 2)
Data integration builds deep competitive advantage
Centralized Institutional Data Repository:
Argus ingests, organizes, and manages historical admissions data that was largely inaccessible—creating a centralized, accessible institutional memory.
Value Accrues Over Time:
Each admissions cycle enriches Argus's understanding of institutional criteria and preferences, enhancing accuracy, consistency, and strategic value year over year.
Long-term Institutional Stickiness:
Deep historical data integration significantly raises switching costs, creating powerful defensibility and driving lasting customer retention.
Argus' institutional data strategy creates enduring competitive advantage and long-term customer lock-in.
How it works (stage 3)
Agentic admissions finds best-fit students - even if they haven't applied
From Applicants to Ideal Candidates:
Argus first evaluates existing applicants, then proactively identifies and matches students who haven't yet applied, but whose Argus skill profiles fit the institution's target admissions criteria.
International Student Recruitment:
International admissions is the ideal initial use-case—U.S. institutions already pay significant fees to recruiting agents. Argus automates this process, proactively identifying needles in a haystack at scale.
No Applications Required:
Institutions can directly admit target international students identified by Argus, bypassing traditional marketing and application processes, significantly reducing cost, complexity, and improving enrollment yield.
Argus shifts institutions from reactive admissions to proactive, precision-driven student recruitment.
How it works (stage 3)
Argus is building the largest, deepest student profile dataset in India
India: Largest Source of International Students:
India is now the #1 global source of international students to the U.S., surpassing China and growing rapidly—making it the ideal starting point for international admissions automation.
Mandatory Argus Assessments Nationwide:
Through our exclusive partnership with India's leading K–12 rankings organization, almost all Indian private schools will administer Argus-powered assessments annually to all students in grades 6–12—including every student aiming for U.S. college admissions.
Unmatched Database and Competitive Advantage:
Argus is creating the deepest, most comprehensive student profile database ever developed in India—and our admissions agents have access to that full dataset.
Our strategic partnership in India gives us an unfair advantage in the world's largest international student market.
GTM: Business Model
Revenue roadmap, with each stage unlocking the next
1
🔹 Stage 1: Replace Seasonal Application Readers:
Immediate entry point—positioning Argus as a trusted institutional partner.
  • Pricing: $30K–$100K per institution annually, depending on volume.
  • Value Proposition: Direct replacement for external seasonal readers, providing immediate savings, scalability, and consistency for admissions offices.
  • Market Fit: Utilizes existing budget for rapid adoption pathway, initial institutional foothold.
2
🔹 Stage 2: Internal Admissions Team Expansion
Direct upsell opportunity that feeds into current budget realities.
  • Pricing: Additional annual tier (+$50K–$100K, cumulative ~ $80K–$200K annually).
  • Value Proposition: Enhances internal team capacity by automating repetitive admissions tasks and evaluation workflows—addressing the impossible demand for admissions teams to increase candidate engagement, while simultaneously reducing budgets, even as they struggle to evaluate rising applicant volumes.
  • Market Fit: Directly solves admissions offices’ core challenge: meeting institutional expectations to increase personalized applicant engagement and strategic enrollment outcomes, despite budget cuts and limited staffing capacity.
🔹 Stage 3: Automated Agentic Student Matching & Recruitment
Revolutionary shift from passive review to proactive global skill identification.
  • Pricing: +$150K–$180K annually per institution.
  • Value Proposition: Argus’s trained admissions agents proactively identify best-fit student profiles worldwide—including students who haven’t applied—bypassing traditional marketing and application processes entirely. Institutions directly recruit targeted students, eliminating the need for costly, top-down marketing and lead-generation campaigns ($100K–$500K domestically, sometimes up to $1M annually) or legacy international agent fees (10 - 15% first year tuition).
  • Market Fit: Institutions gain unprecedented strategic control over class composition and enrollment outcomes. Captures existing spend on lead-generation and marketing. At this stage, colleges also unlock the capability for targeted market research and precise candidate insights, fundamentally reshaping recruitment strategy.
4
🔹 Stage 4: Invisible CRM Replacement
Leverages deep institutional data reliance created by previous stages.
  • Pricing (Projected): +$30K–$80K annually per institution.
  • Value Proposition: With automated admissions, legacy CRMs become obsolete. Argus' "Invisible CRM" serves as the centralized repository and reporting system, offering effortless, agent-driven data access, reporting, and institutional memory.
  • Market Fit: Argus will have fundamentally reshaped institutional expectations of CRM functionality, redefining what colleges demand from their admissions technology.
Staged revenue expansion enables Argus to rapidly grow annual revenue per institution.
GTM: Revenue
Average annual spend by product phase
Revenue per institution grows as we build towards automated admissions
Competition
Argus aggregates university systems to create a new category: Admissions Intelligence Platform (AIP)
Replacing Outsourced Readers & Optimizing Internal Admissions Teams:
  • Legacy Solutions: External contract readers provide limited scalability, inconsistent evaluations, and high recurring costs ($30K–$750K annually per institution). Internal admissions teams are expensive, overwhelmed by repetitive evaluations, and constrained in their ability to focus on strategy and meaningful candidate engagement.
  • Argus Advantage: Scalable application reviews aligned precisely to institutional criteria, significantly reduces annual admissions staffing spend, and enables internal teams to shift focus to strategic initiatives and candidate engagement—potentially redefining the profile and skill set needed for internal admissions roles.
Disrupting Marketing, Lead Generation & Traditional Applications:
  • Legacy Providers (College Board, EAB, Encoura, RNL): Expensive, inefficient top-down campaigns, driving applicants through traditional applications.
  • Argus: Proactively matches ideal student profiles directly—eliminating traditional marketing, applications, and associated spend.
Supplanting Traditional CRMs:
  • Legacy Providers (Slate, Salesforce): Complex, static systems with limited proactive capabilities, high integration burdens, passive data management, leading teams to rely on Google Sheets and Excel.
  • Argus “Invisible CRM”: Proactive, integrated admissions intelligence—transforming passive data storage into strategic, AI-driven institutional insights.
Argus reinvents admissions, changing what institutions expect from their technology.
MOMENTUM
Early Traction & Accelerating Momentum
Demonstrated Product-Market Fit:
Active implementation and/or pilot discussions with Georgetown, Webster, UConn, Pepperdine, DePaul, Ghent, and Calvin, among others. Every admissions team discussion to date has lead to, not if, but how quickly can we collectively align stakeholders to get started.
In our experience working with higher ed, we've never seen teams this ready to embrace new technology.
Exclusive India Partnership:
India partnership rolling out to 1,000+ schools in 2025 ($1K/school annually, $1.5M - $2M projected revenue)- and ultimately 4,000+ schools nationwide - should result in one of the world’s most comprehensive Indian student profile databases.
Inbound Licensing Interest:
To deliver assessments at scale in India, we developed a lightweight, browser-based AI proctoring solution optimized for low-bandwidth environments. This has led to unexpected inbound licensing interest from a major U.S. testing provider that has deep relationships with U.S. higher ed.
2025 Projected Revenue from current pipeline:
$200K
University Admissions
$1.5M+
Indian School Assessments
Strong early signal and important puzzle pieces falling into place...
ASK
Raising $4.5M to Scale Agentic Admissions
Use of funds: Sales & continued build-out of agent infrastructure to deploy Argus into 30–40 key institutions in 2025, laying the foundation to accelerate into 100+ additional colleges in 2026.
Onboard 30+ colleges in 2025; accelerate institutional expansion through 2026.
Addendum
"As talent systems evolve to become more efficient, they also develop the capacity to be more fluid."
Future
Vocational education and bootcamps: growing opportunity beyond traditional college
A Broken Higher-Ed Pipeline:
1/3 of U.S. students never attend college, and half of those who enroll don’t graduate—traditional higher education is failing to serve the majority of students.
Rapidly Emerging Alternative Pathways:
Online vocational training and skills-focused bootcamps are rapidly expanding to fill this gap, providing more accessible, affordable, and job-oriented pathways.
Argus’s Model is Directly Transferable:
Argus’ proactive admissions model, trained on institutional priorities, can seamlessly identify and recruit students into vocational and bootcamp programs—a market that we think may become larger than traditional higher ed.
Vocational education and bootcamps offer enormous potential scale and impact beyond traditional higher education.
Future
Argus Student App for U.S. students–
Personalized College & Career Exploration
Navigating education after high school isn't as simple as it used to be…
Breaking the Binary:
Tomorrow’s students will no longer face a simple choice between college or no college. Specialized vocational programs, bootcamps, and traditional colleges create more pathways—and more complexity.
College & Career Exploration & Hyper-personalized Guidance:
With student-to-counselor ratios approaching 400:1 nationally, personalized guidance has been virtually impossible. Building on the team’s proven expertise from Edupath (#1 mobile college exploration app), Argus will launch an iOS app with college and career guidance through a persistent AI coach.
Ongoing Micro-Assessments & Rich Student Skill Profiles:
The Argus AI coach continuously engages students with adaptive micro-assessments, building deep skill and preference profiles to continuously refine personalized recommendations for colleges, careers, and specialized programs, and match students to vocational programs, colleges, bootcamps and scholarships.
Integrated Data Leads to Effortless Opportunities:
Rich student profiles generated by the app integrate directly with Argus’ institutional admissions agents—enabling proactive identification and matching of ideal student-institution fits, even before students apply.
Personalized student guidance means actionable data profiles for Argus admissions agents.
Thank you!
Questions? For additional information, please contact michael@argus.ai