Schoold, maker of a college and career planning app for students, raised $4.5 million, with its app downloaded more than 500,000 times in its first month.

The funds will be used to “extend and introduce new core functionality” and grow the company’s engineering and marketing teams.

Schoold is intended to pull together “hard-to-find, disparate” data about thousands of colleges, including graduation rates and salary projections, differentiated by subjects at each college.

According to president and COO Joe Ross, “Schoold simplifies an unnecessarily confusing, complex process for students and families with a customised, intuitive app powered by rigorous data science”.

The San Francisco-based app maker said its funding reflects “continued strong investment in the education-technology sector” in the US, citing a CBInsights study which said global ‘EdTech’ funding went up by 58 per cent in 2015.

The funds raised “coupled with the rapid adoption that Schoold’s app is experiencing, is a strong endorsement of our vision, approach and the underlying technology driving the product,” said Sourabh Ahuja, CEO of Schoold.

“We look forward to building Schoold into the de facto, go-to-app for students and parents alike,” he added.

The app was launched in February in the Google Play Store, and Schoold claims it became the number one top free college search app. The following week, Schoold released its iOS app, which also “climbed quickly to hover as a top-15 free app in the App Store”.

Participating investors included FastForward, Lorne Abony, a serial entrepreneur and investor, and several other private investors.