#33: Chisa Egbelu and Kayla Michéle — Founders of Pedul, an EdTech Startup Crowdfunding Platform

“Racism is expensive, sexism is expensive, ableism is expensive. Gen Z is going to force us to care.”

For the first time, we have two guests joining us on Bring It In. Chisa Egbelu and Kayla Michèle are the co-founders of PeduL, a marketplace where corporations can diversify their workforce with scholarships.

PeduL, which is based here in Newark, is the one-stop shop for scholarships. PeduL’s mission is to ensure that all students have equal access to academic and professional opportunities. It was founded on the belief that investing resources into society—especially our youth—will create a more sustainable and prosperous world.

Chisa and Kayla joined forces while they were classmates at Rutgers and soon became a power team. PeduL started out as a crowdfunding platform in 2018, but Chisa and Kayla realized that crowdfunding inherently assumes students have access to a network with money. So they went back to the drawing board and came up with their universal application for scholarships where students can apply to thousands of local and national scholarships at one time through one application. And that’s what PeduL does.

As fellow Newark business-owners and changemakers in their community, Chisa and Kayla had a lot of powerful insights to share when they sat down with Sam Caucci on this episode of Bring It In. They talked about everything from what’s preventing companies from being as equitable as they could be to how we can create sustainable progress in our workforce and in our society.