With universities facing lower international student enrolments and drop-out rates sky-high, now is a good time to launch a business that focuses on student retention, said Newfoundland-based Founder Girish Verma.

Verma has started Lunisity Software to provide technical infrastructure to Student Life Teams in Canadian Universities. His Engage software facilitates the collection of data on student involvement in extra-curricular programming and events.

The idea is to improve the workflows of Student Life teams, which Verma describes as the driving force behind any university's retention and student engagement outside the classroom.

“Student Life Teams are busy drowning in Excel sheets and old tools. It’s a whole mess, and they’re tired of it,” said the third-year computer science student at Memorial University in an interview.

The need is real, Verma said, with one-third of university students currently dropping out, leading to the loss of millions of dollars in tuition revenue. The main reasons students leave are academic, financial and issues around community.

Verma said his Engage infrastructure cuts down the event management, analytics and reporting processes from weeks to seconds, easily allowing staff to analyze the impact of programming and activities on a student's academic and personal life.

He said two competing companies in the U.S. are providing American universities with the kind of software he is developing, but data protection rules mean Canadian universities must store Canadian data on Canadian soil.  To his knowledge, Waterloo University in Ontario is the only Canadian organization to have spent significant money on the issue.

A pilot at Memorial is going well, and he is planning to have his Engage software in three Canadian universities by the fall. It’s possible his software might be sellable in Europe and other domains as many countries are in a similar situation to Canada, he said.

He is currently working alone and bootstrapping. So far, he has received $8,000 in grants and awards from NCE (Networks of Centres of Excellence) and the St. John's innovation hub Genesis, and he is hopeful of gaining $100,000 in grants and awards by the end of the year. He hopes more successful pilots will enable him to go on to raise venture capital.

He said that with the Federal Government cutting the number of international students allowed into Canada, retention is especially important.

“Retention is revenue for universities,” he said. “It is the driving force for any university.”