Emily Chiu

Strategy & Partnerships

At UniversityNow, Emily leads strategy and partnerships that help further the company’s mission of creating greater access to an affordable college education for all. This involves overseeing the launch of special initiatives as well as building partnerships and relationships with student and community groups, civic organizations and education leaders. As part of this, Emily is building UniversityNow’s social campaign to develop a national conversation and network of people invested in the cause of making higher education more affordable and accessible for all.

In the community, Emily currently serves as a Board Advisor to Stanford University’s Women in Business, and the Head of Operations at TEDx San Francisco, where she curated an event that brought together leading thinkers and entrepreneurs to share their visions for rethinking higher education.

Before UniversityNow, Emily was the Founder and CEO of Apply in the Sky, a tech start-up that launched a series of software applications to simplify and organize the graduate school admissions experience for applicants. Apply in the Sky won the Women 2.0 PITCH competition in 2010, and subsequently launched a search tool that helps individuals identify schools and academic programs that are a good fit for their academic and professional goals.

Emily started her career in finance and operations. As an investor at a $4 billion private equity investment fund, she focused on evaluating technology and health care investments, and served as a strategic advisor and Board Observer to several portfolio companies. Prior to this, Emily was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, where she evaluated and structured M&A transactions for leading technology and health care companies, and helped raise a total of over $3 billion in debt and equity financing on behalf of corporate clients.

Emily earned a B.S. in Economics from The Wharton School of Business, with majors in Finance, Entrepreneurship and Health Care Management. She earned a B.A. in International Studies from the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated from the Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business. She also completed an Executive Program in Leadership, Organizing and Action: Leading Change from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.