Sedifly: The AI-Native Service (AINS) Startup Modularizing Expert Education Guidance
This article is based on a written interview with Sedifly’s founder in 2026.
Startup Trend in Southeast Asia: Singapore’s AINS EdTech Sedifly
For families navigating overseas university applications, the stakes are high and the path can often feel opaque. Traditional education consulting firms offer valuable support, but high-touch models that draw on an individual consultant’s knowledge often place them beyond the reach of many families, with rigid programs running into the millions. Singapore-founded EdTech startup Sedifly was built to democratize access to clear, expert guidance without sacrificing the personalized attention that makes advice meaningful.
The company is part of the recent wave of AI-native service (AINS) startups that investors have been touting as the new software-as-a-service (SaaS) category. For every $1 spent on SaaS, $6 is spent on services. Given breakthroughs in AI, AINS firms have managed to attain software-like margins while selling the service and outcomes, instead of the tool.
Sedifly combines a structured curriculum with experienced Strategists and technology that reduces administrative friction and enables its team to make data-backed decisions. Its model is designed to give families greater clarity at key decision points, while allowing its team to focus on the context, judgment, and encouragement that cannot be standardized.
Since launch, Sedifly has grown to a team of more than 40. Its Strategists have collectively helped students secure more than 250 offers from the top 20 colleges in the US or top 5 colleges in the UK, of which over 100 offers were from the Ivy League or Oxbridge. As the company prepares for further expansion in Asia, its focus remains the same: building a repeatable, trusted service that enables personalized guidance and well-informed decisions.
Choosing an education pathway is one of the most consequential decisions many young people and their families will make. Yet access to guidance is uneven. Some families can engage high-touch consultants; others must navigate a complex web of schools, programs, applications, and scholarships largely on their own. Nonprofit organizations support some students but lack scalability.
That gap sits at the heart of Sedifly, a VC-backed EdTech company founded by Joash Lee, an entrepreneur who has seen the education consulting industry from several perspectives: first as a student, then as an operator within the sector, an investor in the startup ecosystem, and now a founder. "The issue was not a lack of ambition,” he says. “It was unequal access to clear guidance and consistent mentorship.”
From First-Hand Experience to a Better Model
The founder’s own route to university was not a conventional one. Moving from a local polytechnic to Columbia University demanded resourcefulness, experimentation, and resilience — as well as the ability to articulate why a non-linear set of experiences mattered.
That journey shaped a lasting belief: standard paths are not the only paths. Ambitious decisions do not require complete certainty, but they do require preparation, deliberate action, and a willingness to adapt as new information emerges. It’s a perspective that now informs Sedifly’s approach to advising students: helping them identify options they may not have considered and make intentional choices about how to pursue them.
The founder later built products that now generate more than US$20 million in annual revenue for the world’s largest education consulting firm. Across those experiences, a recurring pattern became clear. Families were often forced to choose between expensive, highly personalized consulting and making pivotal decisions with limited guidance. Sedifly was created to offer a meaningful alternative — one that makes expertise more transparent and accessible while preserving the human relationship at the center of good mentorship.
Building for Access, Not Simply for Lower Cost
Sedifly’s ambition was never to create a cheaper copy of a traditional consulting model. Instead, the company set out to combine expert judgment, a structured curriculum, and technology in a modularized service that reaches more families. AI has, in fact, improved service quality by enabling data-backed decisions.
Early demand from both students and Strategists signaled that the gap was not a niche frustration. Students wanted more flexible support. Talented advisors wanted a model that could deliver their expertise consistently and at scale. The opportunity, Sedifly realized, was to turn a personal service into a repeatable system.
This distinction matters. Accessibility is not simply about being the lowest-cost option. It is about offering transparent value and creating more ways for families to receive meaningful support. By applying a repeatable curriculum where it improves consistency, and focusing expert time on the moments that require nuanced human judgment, Sedifly aims to make high-quality guidance sustainable for both families and the business.
Scaling Trust and Individual Attention
Growth has brought a central challenge: quality does not scale automatically. In the earliest stages of a company, a founder can hold most of the context and personally review nearly every decision. As the organization expands, that becomes impossible.
For Sedifly, the answer starts with people. Founder knowledge must be translated into clear standards, genuine ownership, and feedback loops that surface problems early. In an inherently personal service business, empathy, communication, and alignment with the mission are as important as credentials.
That principle also guides the student experience. Trust must be designed into the service, rather than left to the effort of individual Strategists. A structured curriculum gives families a clear roadmap, while experienced team members bring the context and judgment that cannot be standardized. Technology helps reduce administrative work and improve coordination, making more room for the conversations that matter.
The goal is straightforward: as Sedifly grows, every student should still feel understood as an individual — not processed as a case.
Technology That Strengthens, Rather Than Replaces, Mentorship
AI is beginning to reshape how students learn and how universities assess applicants. Sedifly sees meaningful opportunities for technology to close information gaps: organizing research, helping spot weaknesses in a student’s activities, surfacing scholarships or relevant opportunities, and making progress easier to track.
But the company is deliberate about where technology ends and human judgment begins. A tool may organize information, but it cannot fully understand family dynamics, recognize when a student has lost confidence, or determine which story is authentically theirs. Strategists provide motivation, accountability, context, and trust — the elements that turn information into sound decisions.
Sedifly’s working model is therefore one of augmented mentorship. Technology can provide reach and useful signals; people provide meaning and judgment. The aim is not less human guidance, but better human guidance. Sedifly is also helping to advance talent intelligence.
Taking a Singapore-Born Model Across Asia
Following a three-times-oversubscribed pre-seed round, Sedifly is raising its seed round and considering expansion within Asia. Singapore provides an international perspective, but the company recognizes that education remains deeply local.
Families in different markets may define success differently and make decisions through different family structures. School calendars, application pathways, trusted institutions, communication habits, and attitudes toward risk can all vary. For that reason, Sedifly does not intend to simply copy and paste the Singapore model into new markets.
Its approach is to listen first, work with credible local partners, and test the model in a focused way. The core commitments — transparency, individual attention and expert guidance — will remain constant. How the company communicates, packages its service, and matches students with advisors will need to adapt market by market.
A Founder’s View: Solve Real Problems, Then Learn Quickly
Experience on both the investing and operating sides of the startup ecosystem has also shaped Sedifly’s development. The enduring lesson is to begin with the problem, rather than becoming attached to a solution and searching for reasons it should exist. Who feels the problem most acutely? How can they be reached? Is there a sustainable business in solving it?
Good founders, he believes, hold strong convictions loosely. They commit fully to a mission, test assumptions quickly, learn from what the market reveals, and change course when the evidence warrants it. The first version of an idea is rarely the one that ultimately works.
It is a practical philosophy with a human center. Spreadsheets can illuminate a business, but they cannot capture the full complexity of the people it serves. For Sedifly, that means pairing discipline and technology with empathy, good judgment, and genuine care for students’ futures.
As the company enters its next phase, that combination will be central to its ambition: making high-quality education guidance more accessible, while ensuring that scale never comes at the expense of trust.
