Joey Rahimi

In 2002, Joey Rahimi was a student at Carnegie Mellon University — working toward his BS in Entrepreneurship — when he started building something in his dorm room. The idea was College Prowler: a platform that would give prospective students honest, peer-sourced information about what college life was actually like before they committed to a school. At a time when college selection relied almost entirely on glossy brochures and campus visit talking points, it was a genuinely disruptive concept.

College Prowler grew. Over the years that followed it became one of the most widely used college comparison tools in the country, eventually evolving into Niche.com — a platform that today serves more than 50 million users annually, hosts over 140 million ratings and reviews, and maintains in-depth profiles on every school and college in America. The company Joey started in a CMU dorm room became the market leader in connecting students and families with the right schools.

That origin story is the foundation of everything Joey brings to Grantford. He has spent more than two decades professionally immersed in the world of college — how students find schools, how families make decisions, what information they need and what they can't easily access. College Prowler was built around the transparency gap in college selection. Grantford is built around the transparency gap in college funding. The problem is different but the instinct is exactly the same.

Joey is also approaching this as a parent. He has three young children whose college years are ahead of them, and like any parent who has spent twenty-plus years in the education space, he's already thinking about how to help them navigate the system strategically. His niece and nephew are both college students currently studying in Europe — a reminder that the path through higher education looks different for every family and that the best outcomes tend to go to families who do their homework early.

Beyond founding Grantford, Joey runs Woodside Ventures, a growth marketing agency focused on modern search strategy — SEO, content development, and generative engine optimization (GEO), the emerging discipline of getting content surfaced in AI-driven results like Google AI Overviews. He writes about these topics regularly and has developed a reputation for being ahead of the curve on how search is evolving and what that means for publishers who want to stay visible and relevant as AI reshapes how people find information.

He remains actively connected to Carnegie Mellon's entrepreneurship community through the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, where he leads workshops and delivers talks for business and entrepreneurship students, and has participated in CMU's CONNECTS program. The through-line between founding a company at CMU and returning to mentor the students doing the same thing twenty years later is not lost on him — and it's part of what makes his investment in Grantford more than just a business bet. He genuinely believes that access to clear, honest, well-researched information changes outcomes for families. That's what College Prowler tried to do. It's what Grantford is trying to do.

He is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.