Screen Shot 2013-11-05 at 9.19.28 AMMicrosoft Ventures announced today that it has expanded its investment portfolio to include Ranku, a service that aims to be the Yelp for students looking to go to back to school online.

Ranku wants to give students seeking a fully-online education a full look at all of their options, not just the most popular ones. While for-profit institutions like DeVry University and University of Phoenix spend tons of money on television advertising, schools like the University of Arizona and Georgetown also offer online-only instruction, but don’t market it as aggressively as their competitors.

The dominance of for-profit institutions is concerning, though. A recent study showed that students at for-profit institutions are more likely to be unemployed and on average earn less than their counterparts who graduated from public and non-profit two- and four-year institutions.

Microsoft Ventures, for its part, is enthusiastic about supporting Ranku’s mission.

1121.MS_DiagramV7“We love supporting startups that help disrupt big problem spaces, and the fact is, education is in desperate need of disruption globally,” said Microsoft Ventures Partner and General Manager Rahul Sood in a press release. “Ranku provides an incredible service to help students navigate the process of finding the right online degree program to reach their education goals.”

Microsoft Ventures is the new umbrella group that takes all of Microsoft’s previous efforts to support startups and brings them under one roof. At this summer’s START conference in San Francisco, Sood said that entrepreneurs didn’t always take advantage of all the opportunities Microsoft offered, and that Microsoft Ventures was intended to alleviate some of that confusion. Furthermore, Microsoft Ventures represents an effort by the Redmond-based company to throw its hat in the ring alongside other, more established players, like Google, which has its own venture arm.

Ranku is the second investment the company has made under the Microsoft Ventures umbrella. The first was Israeli startup SkyGiraffe, which aims to give businesses a way to deploy mobile applications to users’ phones without writing code. Microsoft has made previous investments in startups through its Bing Fund.

Ranku recently graduated from TechStars New York, and has also picked up an investment from Mark Cuban. The terms of its deal with Microsoft Ventures were not disclosed.

To check out Ranku for yourself, visit goranku.com.

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