In 2021, CampusKnot was at a crossroads. The startup, founded in 2015 in Starkville, Mississippi, had already been in the market for several years, experimenting with features and business models in the higher education space. But something wasn’t quite clicking, says CEO Rahul Gopal. The product had features professors liked and had gained some traction, but lacked a clear identity. Then came a turning point—during the quiet of the pandemic, the founding team took a step back, reexamined everything they had built, and made a bold decision: It was time to pivot.
“We realized a few things that were sticking and a few that weren’t. We also had a very good idea of the space we were operating in, and we saw a very clear void,” Gopal said.
Competitors trying to address student engagement in the classroom would focus on one aspect—community building, feedback, or discussions—but weren’t looking at the professor’s challenges holistically. “That was our positioning—where we already had features that would tackle all of these. We just needed to hone in on it and focus,” he said.
That insight reshaped CampusKnot’s future. The team blocked out the noise and focused on five core pillars: community building, real-time feedback, attendance, rewards, and data-driven engagement metrics. A new vision emerged from that foundation: CampusKnot became a well-rounded student engagement platform built specifically for professors.
The timing couldn’t have been better. With classrooms disrupted by COVID-19 and higher education institutions looking for ways to keep students involved remotely, CampusKnot used the pandemic slowdown to rebuild from the inside out. “There wasn’t much growth possible in those years, so we built,” Gopal said. “We re-engineered the product and got clear about our positioning.” That clarity paid off. Since the pivot, CampusKnot has grown steadily—50 percent year-over-year for four straight years—and is now targeting a 2x growth rate heading into 2025.
The post-pivot product is powered by AI, but not in the flashy, buzzword-heavy way some startups chase. CampusKnot’s AI works behind the scenes as a virtual teaching assistant. It helps professors create content, summarize classroom discussions, give students instant feedback, and even auto-grades open-ended responses. Perhaps most importantly, it turns classroom engagement into data, offering professors a real-time view of who’s participating, how they’re engaging, and what might need attention.
In 2023, the company unlocked a significant milestone—solving its distribution challenge. New partnerships gave CampusKnot access to over 1,000 campuses and integrated it directly into the systems professors already use. Now, faculty at participating institutions can adopt CampusKnot as easily as selecting a textbook, with no extra cost to students. “That changed everything,” Gopal said. “It lowered the barrier to entry and made adoption frictionless.”
CampusKnot’s growth is deeply rooted in Mississippi’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. The company began at Mississippi State University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach. Innovate Mississippi helped fuel early development and growth with mentorship from the team and $200,000 via the Mississippi Seed Fund. Recently, CampusKnot has benefited from a $500,000 raise involving the InvestMS program.
In early 2025, CampusKnot joined the Village X Accelerator in New Orleans, connecting with national advisors and refining its go-to-market strategy. “Everyone in this Gulf Coast ecosystem has played a role in helping us get here,” Gopal said.
And where is “here?” Gopal says their goals are to refine their go-to-market strategies, expand their professor network across the nation and scale over the next two years. If that proves out, then CampusKnot will have shown that the right pivot, made at the right time, can change everything.
