What we have announced.

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.