About Ziplines
Ziplines Education partners with universities to provide high-impact, digital-first career training so individuals can confidently pursue the career they’ve always wanted. Ziplines is a series A-funded ed-tech startup with one goal—helping students attain the real-world skills they need to thrive in careers they love by partnering with universities.
Ziplines has created a name in the B2B2C education space and provides real-world courses to students in partnership with universities.
About This Project
Ziplines is a series A-funded ed-tech startup with one goal—helping students attain the real-world skills they need to thrive in careers they love by partnering with universities. Before the series A funding, Ziplines had a small team performing marketing, payments, and LMS operations manually. They hit a growth curve and all their systems and manual processes failed to handle the sudden growth.
Ziplines wanted to build a brain called CLAS(Central Learner Administration System) that connects HubSpot(CRM), Stripe and Affirm(payment systems), Canvas(LMS) and SCORM(course delivery). We partnered with them to build out CLAS.
The Challenge
Ziplines is an e-learning company that partners with universities to deliver real-world, industry-aligned courses. Like many education startups, they started by piecing together tools—HubSpot, Stripe, Canvas (SCORM)—to launch fast and validate their model.
But as enrollments surged, their manual processes couldn’t keep up. Stripe payments needed to be manually reconciled with HubSpot CRM. Learner data was fragmented across platforms. Operational overhead was rising, and team members were spending hours firefighting errors.
They needed a system that could scale with them, not against them.
Our Approach
We began with discovery workshops, mapping their operational surface area across marketing, enrollment, payments, and learner progress. Our consultative sessions uncovered critical gaps:
- No single source of truth across systems
- Increasing data mismatch and reconciliation errors
- Siloed workflows limiting visibility across teams
We proposed a phased approach to stabilize, centralize, and scale:
Phase 1: Stabilize
Address critical workflows and stop the operational bleeding.
Phase 2: Centralize
Create a central orchestration layer to manage data and processes.
Phase 3: Enable
Build a foundation for future automation, analytics, and features.
The Solution: CLAS
The Central Learner Administration System
We designed and built CLAS, a custom orchestration platform that acts as the “brain” of Ziplines’ operations. It seamlessly integrates data from HubSpot, Stripe, and Canvas, replacing fragmented workflows with end-to-end automation.
This gave their team:
- One source of truth across all systems.
- Faster onboarding for new learners and universities.
- Streamlined refund, invoicing, and transfer workflows.
- A modular architecture to add new features without breaking the system
Results & Evolution
60%
Reduction in manual operational workload.
98%
Error Reduction in data reconciliation errors.ns.
04%
Revenue growth for Ziplines since our partnership began.
Why This Matters For You
Many of the challenges faced by Ziplines mirror what your team is experiencing now: fragmented tools (Airtable, SendGrid, Mailchimp), no single owner for the tech surface area, a platform not built to scale, and gaps in data flow.
With Ziplines, we didn’t just build software—we helped them evolve their platform mindset. We started small (1 dev), earned trust through clarity and delivery, and scaled thoughtfully.
We’d love to explore how a similar partnership could help your team bring order, clarity, and confidence to your platform as it grows.
