Student loans are a major burden for millions of people: Some 43 million Americans currently hold an estimated $1.2 trillion in student debt, and 7 out of 10 college grads leave school with an average loan balance of $29,000. With figures like these, it’s more crucial than ever that students have transparency and choice when it comes to borrowing money for school.

LendEDU is a startup in our current Winter 2016 class that aims to do for the student debt market what Kayak has done for the online travel industry — making the process of shopping around for the best deal as easy and accessible as possible. LendEDU has built a marketplace for student loan refinancing that helps students, parents, and graduates save money through price transparency.

TechCrunch’s Jonathan Shieber wrote about LendEDU in a story published today:

“The refinancing process for student loans is just too damn hard.

Normally, anyone looking to refinance their student loans has to fill
out a fairly lengthy application each time they want to receive a loan.
Their idea was… quite simply… to get rid of that hassle.

LendEDU is the
fruit of [co-founders Nate Matherson and Matt Lenhard’s] year-long sojourn in the entrepreneurial wild. A
marketplace for student loan refinancing, the company’s service is
simple. One application gets you visibility into all of the many
different options for student loan refinancing.

…Average users at
LendEDU save roughly $12,000 by refinancing their student loan debt
(that’s a lot of beer, pizza, and ramen, y’all).”

Read the whole story here.