Built by people who had to answer the question themselves.
Pennant didn't start as a product idea. It started as the Sunday-night spreadsheet — the one stitched from CRM exports and ad-platform screenshots before every leadership meeting.
The story
From stitched reports to one live view
Before Pennant was software, it was a job: running enrollment marketing for real institutions — private universities, career schools, continuing education programs — and being accountable for what every dollar produced. The data existed. It just lived in five places, spoke four languages, and went stale the moment it was assembled.
So we built the thing we kept wishing existed: one live view of spend, pacing, attribution, and yield, computed in the units enrollment people actually use, with cost math honest enough to survive the hardest question in the room. Pennant runs that view every day across the institutions we serve.
The founders
Chris Sheppard
Co-founder
TODO: short bio — background, what Chris owns at Pennant, and one human detail.
Rustam Irani
Co-founder
TODO: short bio — background, what Rustam owns at Pennant, and one human detail.
How we work
Four principles we won't trade away
Honest math, even when it stings
Cost metrics divide spend by paid-source volume only — including when that makes the numbers look worse. A dashboard you can't defend in a hard meeting isn't worth building.
Privacy as architecture, not policy
Pennant stores zero student PII — not because a policy forbids it, but because the system never ingests it. The strongest privacy promise is the one the database can't break.
Sit on top, don't replace
Your CRM is the system of record and should stay that way. Pennant adds the layer it can't provide — spend, pacing, honest costs, cohorts — without asking anyone to change how they work.
Plain language over jargon
Inquiries, applications, enrollments, dollars. If a metric needs a translation layer before the cabinet understands it, the metric is the problem.
Talk to the people who built it.
Demos are run by the founders — ask the hard questions.