Admissions, with a data layer: Apex Education, the Egyptian admissions counselling firm that has placed students at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Stanford, was acquired earlier this year by Jordan-founded edtech platform Abwaab, according to a joint statement (pdf). The plan, the two founders tell us, is to keep Apex as a premium boutique brand for affluent families across the region — and to build a separate, lower-cost product, sitting on top of Apex’s IP and Abwaab’s student data, for the much larger market that can’t afford thousands of USD in counselling fees. Abwaab co-founder and CEO Hamdi Tabbaa declined to disclose the value of the acquisition.

Apex’s pitch starts with a market gap. “We noticed a very big gap between the support that students back home in Egypt were getting when they were looking to apply to these top global universities versus the support that we realized other people were getting from other countries and other schools abroad,” Apex co-founder and CEO Leila Hassan tells EnterpriseAM. “There are so many bright students back home and we wanted to offer them as much support as possible […] to actually stand a better chance of getting into these top universities.”

This is not the same old university-agent model. At one end of the admissions market are study-abroad agents, who represent partner universities and are typically paid by those institutions when a student enrolls. Apex sits in the smaller, higher-touch part: independent counselling paid for by families, with no university-side incentive shaping where students apply. “We don’t represent any specific university, we are not affiliated with a specific university, and, most importantly, we don’t encourage students or push students towards any specific universities because there’s no incentive there for us,” Hassan says. “When a student or family comes to us, we advise them completely independently.”

Independent admissions counselling is still a niche, affluent-family product. Apex’s core destinations are the US, UK, Canada, and Western Europe, where tuition alone puts the service out of reach for most families without scholarships or financial aid. Targeted guidance can cost a few hundred USD, while comprehensive, multi-year support for students applying to highly selective universities can reach several thousand USD, Hassan says. Apex has worked with more than 300 students since launch, including 39 in the most recent admissions cycle. The market is growing steadily, she adds, but remains “mostly concentrated among affluent families.”

Apex works with students on university selection, extracurricular planning, application positioning, essays, interview prep, and managing deadlines. The bulk of the work, Hassan says, is helping students figure out how to present themselves. “We don’t write on behalf of the student. But the student gets one-on-one personalized guidance to brainstorm, draft, and complete their essays.” US applications are typically the most writing-intensive, with some students preparing “literally 20, 25 essays,” while UK, Canada, and Europe applications tend to be “a bit more condensed.” That workload is also pulling the admissions timeline forward: most students still come in Grade 12, but more families are starting in Grade 11, while students targeting the most selective US universities are being encouraged to begin as early as Grade 9 or Grade 10.

Abwaab has wider regional plans. The platform plans to keep Apex as an independent, high-end admissions advisory brand under its wider umbrella, with the GCC as the immediate expansion target. The families able to pay for top US and UK universities are also concentrated in high-purchasing-power markets like Saudi Arabia. “We think there is a lot more to be done within Egypt, but also we can take this to the rest of the MENA region and the GCC,” Tabbaa tells EnterpriseAM. Abwaab aims to grow Apex by multiples, he adds, but “you are not looking at hundreds of thousands of students receiving that specific high-end service in the way it is delivered right now.”

The Jordan-founded online learning platform that offers curriculum-aligned lessons, test prep, and teacher support says mns of students have studied through its services. The company wants to use Apex’s admissions know-how and its own student data to build a separate, lower-cost recommendation engine for its wider base, including national-curriculum students looking at regional universities. The platform handles “bns of data points” on student engagement, Tabbaa says, which can be used to recommend universities, majors, areas of strength, and areas needing improvement. “We are going to use these insights and our tech infrastructure to offer a similar service to the masses.”

That does not mean fully automated counselling. The model is closer to tech-augmented advising: automation handles diagnostics, tracking, requirements, portfolios, and matching, while the counsellor remains the main relationship point. “You tap into their brains, their admissions experience, and their human ability to understand the student, while the automation platform handles the data backend,” Tabbaa says. The augmentation could improve unit economics by 20-40%, he adds, without trying to remove the human judgment at the center of the process.

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