Universities
This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in providing academic courses and granting degrees at the bachelor or graduate levels. The requirement for admission is at least a high school diploma or equivalent general academic training for baccalaureate programs, and often a baccalaureate degree for professional or graduate programs. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 237
- Under 10 employeesA
- 14%
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 237 Canadian establishments with employees, 14% have fewer than ten — an industry where large establishments carry real weight.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 611, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Public education is not a market. Private career colleges, tutoring and skills instruction are, with accreditation and student-loan eligibility as the real barriers.
- Who sets the price
- Public funding for the core system; the operator for private and vocational training.
- The software it runs on
- Student information and learning management systems; booking and billing for private instruction.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
No operating-business record sits in this industry — the records filed here are software markets, shown in the next section.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Alumni software sits between two records that are already on the atlas. The higher-ed SIS/LMS record (611310) covers the system that knows who graduated; the nonprofit-fundraising record (8132) covers the donor CRM that books the gift. Advancement is where they meet: the university's development office runs a nonprofit-style donor CRM, but its prospects are its own alumni, fed from the SIS. So the market splits into two layers. The system of record is the advancement CRM, and it is held by Blackbaud and Ellucian. Blackbaud sells Raiser's Edge NXT and Blackbaud CRM to universities and private schools out of the same $1.14B-revenue business recorded on 8132 [A, via that record]; Ellucian sells CRM Advance (Microsoft Dynamics/Power BI based) and its Banner and Colleague advancement modules alongside the SIS it already runs [C, vendor]. Salesforce Education Cloud is the third option. Gift history, pledges, endowment and scholarship accounting and decades of constituent records live here, and a switch is an SIS-scale project. The engagement layer — alumni community, directory, mentoring, events, giving days, video, donor signals — is where the startups went, and it has already been rolled up. Gravyty (K1 Investment Management) is Graduway's alumni community merged in December 2021 with Gravyty's AI fundraising tools, after K1 put about $60M into Graduway in 2019 and $21M into Gravyty in 2020 [B]; it now claims 2,750+ institutions [C]. EverTrue was combined with ThankView under a Rubicon Technology Partners majority investment in October 2021 and has since added Pledgemine, Fundriver and DonorSearch [B/C]. Anthology's alumni products (Encompass, the old iModules; Advance; Raise) went to Encoura in February 2026 after Anthology broke itself up [B/C]. Hivebrite, the best-funded independent (€18.5M Series A 2019, €35M Series B 2023 led by Quadrille Capital with Insight Partners [B]), is not an alumni company any more: only about 20% of its revenue comes from education [B, Maddyness]. Hivebrite was not acquired by EverTrue — it remains independent and itself bought Orbiit in 2024. Almabase is the counter-example: bootstrapped after about $500K of early angel and 500 Startups money, it sells an alumni engagement and giving layer that syncs to Raiser's Edge, Blackbaud CRM, Salesforce and Ellucian [C]. PeopleGrove ($1.8M seed and $4.7M Series A, both led by Reach Capital [B]) went toward student career mentoring and has merged with CORE's clinical-placement software. The wedge is narrow and occupied. Every engagement vendor already sells 'works on top of your Raiser's Edge', the buyer is a committee-led, academic-year procurement office (the distribution problem on the SIS record), and general-purpose donation tools like Givebutter ($50M from BVP Forge, 2024 [B]) set the floor for giving pages. Incumbent vulnerability decides it: the CRM layer is not vulnerable, and the layer above it is owned by three PE-backed roll-ups and a profitable bootstrapper.
Procurement is committee-driven, RFP-gated and aligned to the academic year, with 12–24 month cycles and multi-year contracts. An SIS migration is treated with the same caution as a core banking replacement and happens about as often. Free, credible open source (Moodle) also caps the LMS price floor. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 12
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| BlackbaudNASDAQ:BLKB | Universities611310 | $1.1B | 1/12 |
| EllucianPrivate | Universities611310 | — | 2/12 |
| GivebutterPrivate | Universities611310 | — | 3/12 |
| InstructureDelisted | Universities611310 | — | 4/12 |
| MoodlePrivate | Universities611310 | — | 5/12 |
| AlmabasePrivate | Universities611310 | — | 6/12 |
| AnthologyPrivate | Universities611310 | — | 7/12 |
| EncouraPrivate | Universities611310 | — | 8/12 |
| EverTruePrivate | Universities611310 | — | 9/12 |
| GravytyPrivate | Universities611310 | — | 10/12 |
| HivebritePrivate | Universities611310 | — | 11/12 |
| PeopleGrovePrivate | Universities611310 | — | 12/12 |
Who works here
The occupations employed in Educational services, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.