He Sold His Last Startup to Sallie Mae. Now He's Taking on Kaplan for $9 a Month
Slice of Education Team
07/29/2025
Introduction
Christopher Gray isn’t new to shaking up education. After winning over $1 million in college scholarships and selling his first company, Scholly, to Sallie Mae, he’s back with a new mission: make test prep as cheap and accessible as Netflix.
High-Level Description
Gray’s latest venture, Path, is a subscription-based AI platform that gives students unlimited access to test prep for just $9 a month. Think SAT, ACT, GRE, MCAT, CompTIA, you name it. Instead of shelling out $2,000 to Kaplan, students get unlimited practice exams, predictive scoring, and personalized tutoring for a fraction of the cost.
How It All Started
Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Gray was the first in his family to attend college. He launched Scholly while still a student at Drexel, famously landing a deal on Shark Tank that catapulted the app to the front page of the App Store. Over a decade, he scaled the company to millions of users and helped students secure hundreds of millions in scholarships. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. A misstep with a 99-cent pricing model during the Shark Tank debut taught him a valuable lesson: a great product isn’t enough without the right business model.
That lesson is core to Path.
Why It Stands Out
Unlike traditional prep companies that rely on expensive human-made materials, Path uses AI to instantly generate accurate practice content and simulate real exam scenarios. The result? Unlimited, on-demand prep across dozens of tests for the price of a cup of coffee. Users get predictive scores before they even take the test, helping them avoid the costly surprise of failure on high-stakes exams like the MCAT or CompTIA, which can cost hundreds just to sit for.
Where Kaplan and Princeton Review serve mostly upper-middle-class students, Gray is building something that works for everyone.
Who It Helps
Path is built for students who can’t afford $100/hour tutors or thousand-dollar courses. It’s especially impactful for first-gen college hopefuls, students juggling jobs, and families navigating college admissions without a safety net. And because the platform includes everything from high school entrance exams to cybersecurity certifications, it's also a lifeline for career switchers and adult learners.
Where It’s Going
The roadmap is bigger than test prep. Gray wants to build a full-scale AI tutor that adapts to every student’s needs and learning pace, potentially disrupting not just tutoring but traditional schooling itself. “We’re going to see AI-centric schools,” he says, imagining a future where practice is personalized, feedback is instant, and expensive instruction is no longer a gatekeeper.
Conclusion
Gray’s not out to replace teachers, but he is betting that AI can make education more equitable. If Path succeeds, a $9 subscription could do what a $2,000 course never could: level the playing field.
