Scaling Ziplines
From a startup stack to a centralized, scalable platform
Client
Ziplines Education
Industry
Educational
Service
Product Engineering
Tech Stack
Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis
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 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.
Services
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.
- No single source of truth across systems
- Increasing data mismatch and reconciliation errors
- Siloed workflows limiting visibility across teams
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
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
We designed and built CLAS (Central Learner Administration System), 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.
- 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
4%
Revenue growth since partnership launch
Tech Stack
Why This Matters
Many of the challenges faced by Ziplines mirror what your team might be 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.