What we have announced.

Capy is the counselor that actually does the work. Behind it is Counseling Intelligence, a method we built from research and from the judgment of more than 150 admissions officers and experienced college counselors. It reads a student's profile the way an admissions office would, then coaches them through every step, like a private counselor. More than 600 students in 11 countries use it today, and each one gets about 51 hours of their application back.

Most AI tools for college applications start from an empty box. They answer the question you type, and they know about admissions what the internet knows. A good private counselor starts from you: your record, your hours, your goals. That is the counselor we set out to build.

Counseling Intelligence has two halves. The first is research: how U.S. admissions offices read a file, what they weigh, and where strong students lose ground without knowing it. The second is judgment. More than 150 admissions officers and experienced college counselors showed us, profile by profile, what a strong application looks like and what only looks busy.

Then we built the data by hand. People chose which of the 1,000+ programs, competitions and scholarships in Capy earn a spot, and checked their deadlines. People rewrote hundreds of Common App activity descriptions so Capy would learn what a strong one sounds like. People marked every place an early version of Capy gave credit it should not have, until its reads were strict. No one can download that data. It is ours.

That is why Capy reads a profile the way an admissions office does. Every activity, every hour, every honor and every grade, set against the major the student wants. It shows how much of their time already points there, names the gap, and finds the program that closes it.

Then it does the work with them, step by step. It builds a college list balanced across reach, target and safety schools. It reviews every essay, flags the lines that could be anyone's and says what to write instead. It reads the transcript subject by subject and estimates the GPA on the U.S. scale. It gives each teacher writing a letter a brag sheet. And it keeps every deadline in one timeline, month by month.

At the end, the Capy extension carries all of it into the Common App. It is the only Common App autofill that actually works end to end: activities, honors, grades, tests, the essay and the college list go in with one click, and nothing already there is overwritten.

The result is time. For a student applying to 10 colleges, the work takes about 113 hours with bcs instead of 164. That is about 51 hours back, for the essay that gets them in.

Private counseling averages $6,500 per student per year. Counseling Intelligence gives every student the same method, and Capy is free.

Juan Teles, who founded bcs, on the method:

A great counselor does not hand you tips. They read your whole story, tell you the truth about it and walk you to every deadline. We wrote down how the best of them think, built the data by hand and put it inside Capy, so every student gets that counselor, not only the ones who can pay for one.

Capy is free, with immediate access and no card. Start at bcscholars.com.

Common App is a registered trademark of The Common Application, Inc. bcs is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Common App.

Capy fills your Common App. Starting today, the activities, honors, grades, tests, essay and college list a student builds with Capy, our AI college counselor, go into the Common App with one click. It is the first of its kind: the only Common App autofill that starts from your counselor.

The Common App has no import button. A student who spent months shaping their activities still retypes every one of them, box by box. Each copy is a chance to cut a description short, drop an honor, or paste last week's draft of the essay.

The extension does that typing. It fills up to 10 activities and 5 honors in the order the student chose, grades and class rank as the school reports them, this year's courses, and SAT and TOEFL scores. For ACT, AP, IB, IELTS and Duolingo it selects the test and leaves the scores to the student. It pastes the one essay the student picks. It adds the colleges on their list that take the Common App, with the admission plan for each.

It never overwrites. A field that already has something in it is left alone, essays included. When it finishes, it shows three lists: what it filled, what was already there, and what is left for the student. Run it again and it fills just what is missing.

It checks the language. Many bcs students draft in Portuguese before they write in English. Anything not in English stays out of the Common App, and the side panel shows each item to fix, with a link to it. We do not rewrite a student's words for them.

It keeps the application where it is. The extension works on the Common App site and nowhere else, and what it reads there stays in the student's browser. To keep the extension working, it sends us counts linked to the student's bcs account: how many fields it filled, skipped or left in each section, and the name of any field it could not find on the page. Never what is in them, and no screen recording.

Some parts stay with the student: the Profile section, intended majors and supplement essays. Capy does not ask for a home address, a phone number, gender or ethnicity, so it has nothing to put there.

Juan Teles, who founded bcs, on why it exists:

Applications are loud. Capy is calm. October should go to the essay that gets you in, not to typing ten activities into boxes for the second time. Capy already knows your story. Now one click puts it in your Common App.

The extension is free, like Capy. It works in Chrome, on a computer. Students connect their bcs account once, open the Common App and press one button. Start free at bcscholars.com.

Common App is a registered trademark of The Common Application, Inc. bcs is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Common App.

WOW Aceleradora has reached 200 startups invested across 13 years of operation. bcs is one of the four companies in the latest batch, the one that closed that number.

The investment in bcs was R$ 200,000, inside the standard check of up to R$ 500,000 that WOW always writes as part of a startup's first round.

The piece describes bcs as an AI college counseling platform that follows students through the entire application journey: from choosing universities and setting the strategy through to essays, scholarships, deadlines and admission decisions. That is a fair description. It is what Bruno does, and it is the whole journey rather than a slice of it.

The 200 portfolio companies are held up by a network of 500 angel investors. There have been 17 exits so far, and 37 founders WOW invested in have come back as investors in the accelerator itself.

Filipe Garcia, WOW's CEO, says the model only works when the founder's success is the main motivator, because it is the startups' success that returns the money to the investors.

The accelerator's long-standing bet is on founders with technical training — engineering, computer science, mathematics — for their ability to build product. Filipe says that filter is what has been taking WOW, by derivation, toward artificial intelligence businesses. Its own selection process now uses AI to go deeper on the theses it receives.

For bcs, what Filipe calls WOW's main differentiator is not the check. It is the nearly 600 founders across the 200 companies, trading every day what worked and what did not in hiring, scaling and artificial intelligence — including what went wrong.

None of this changes what we are building. 16.7 million students are priced out of college counseling, and Bruno still costs less than 2% of what private counseling costs. The investment only shortens the road to them.

Reporting by Gabriela Del Carmen, published in Startups on September 16, 2026.

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Bruno is a model. Models do not know anything about college applications until someone who actually went through one sits down and shows them what good looks like.

Three people did a lot of that showing.

Gabriela de Sá — LinkedIn profile

Stanford University

Gabriela worked on alignment scoring, which is the part of Bruno that looks at everything a student has done and tells them how much of it points where they think it points.

It is the least fun feature we have. It is also the one students tell us changed the most.

Early on, Bruno was too generous. It would look at a long list of activities and call it strong because it was long. Gabriela spent months on the other side of that, pulling real profiles apart and marking every place the model gave credit it should not have given. The version students use now is stricter because she made it stricter.

If you have ever gotten a read from Bruno that felt uncomfortably accurate, that is partly her.

Melissa Simplicio — LinkedIn profile

New York University

Melissa worked on the writing side. Mostly Common App activity descriptions, which have to do a lot of work in 150 characters.

Writing one badly is easy. You list what the club did, you use the word “passionate,” you run out of room. Almost every student’s first draft looks like that, and so did almost every one of Bruno’s.

Melissa rewrote hundreds of them by hand so the model had something to learn from. She was the one who kept insisting that a good description shows a decision the student made, not a title they held. That idea is now baked into how Bruno writes.

Juan Teles — LinkedIn profile

Dartmouth College

Juan worked on Mapping, the database of 700 programs, competitions, and scholarships that Bruno pulls from when it finds a gap in a profile.

Mapping only works if the list behind it is honest. Somebody has to decide what earns a spot and what is just a summer program with a nice website and a $6,000 fee. For a long stretch, that somebody was Juan.

He is also the reason the deadlines are right. That sounds small until you miss one.

Students using bcs today are getting advice shaped by people who were sitting exactly where they are a couple of years ago, and by the over 150 admissions officers who also helped us build this.

Bruno will support millions of students and counselors, cutting the time wasted on applications and helping them aim higher.

Bruno reads a student's whole profile. Every activity, every hour, every award, cross referenced against their intended major and against 700 real programs, competitions, and scholarships. It finds the gap. It finds the thing that closes the gap. Then it holds the deadline until the student gets there.

It's already running. Ten schools across São Paulo use bcs today. 9 in 10 students recommend it to a friend. 88% said they felt better prepared. On average they save about 31% of the hours a full application cycle takes. One of them starts at Northwestern this fall.

Today we're announcing that WOW has invested in bcs at a $1 million valuation. 276 startups applied to Batch #34. Four got in. WOW has accelerated 195+ companies since 2013, with 17 exits and a network of 500+ investors.

We're also supported by NVIDIA Inception, Google for Startups, the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth, and Agathós Educational Group.

16.7 million students are priced out of college counseling. Private counseling averages $6,500 per student per year. Bruno costs less than 2% of that. That's the whole reason this exists.

The waitlist is open.

A profile that looked busy and read as scattered.

It's the most common shape a strong student arrives in, and it's the hardest one to see from the inside. Real hours, real work, no through line.

That was João Vitor Santos when he joined our first pilot cohort. He'd already tried three other platforms. Bruno was rough then. Mapping had a fraction of the opportunities it has now, and most of what we know today about how students actually use this product, we hadn't learned yet.

In his words:

To be honest, I had tried over 3 platforms, but what I didn't expect was that this one would be so much better. Bruno read my activities, saw the gap, and then Mapping surfaced programs that filled exactly that gap. Not generic suggestions. I did one of them over the summer, logged it, and watched my alignment jump. Then the Common App descriptions got rewritten around the new version of my profile. Every piece fed the next one.

Truly, for me, the part I keep circling back to is the Mapping feature. Not that it found programs, but that it found the specific one that closed the gap Bruno had just named. That's the difference between a list and a recommendation. That in itself is worth hundreds, and I recommend this for everyone.

The program was Yale Young Global Scholars. He spent the summer there, logged it, and the rest of the file reorganized itself around the new version of his profile. Activities, descriptions, school list, essays.

That loop is the whole product. Read the profile. Find the gap. Surface the thing that closes it. Rewrite everything downstream once it's done.

We tracked his cycle closely enough to measure it. Bruno saved him at least 40% of the time the application would have taken.

João Vitor is now at Northwestern, Class of 2030.

He also still works with us, on model training and evaluation. So the students using bcs today are getting advice shaped in part by someone who was sitting exactly where they are, on a version of Bruno that was worse than the one they have.

João Vitor Santos was a member of the bcs pilot cohort and contributes to model training and evaluation at bcs.