College admissions applications have surged 9% in the 2025-2026 cycle while acceptance rates at top schools have plummeted below 10%, creating a landscape where families navigate decisions with incomplete information and counselors face mounting pressure to provide confident guidance despite limited reliable data. With students now applying to an average of 5.38 schools and counselors managing outcomes across hundreds of institutions annually, the gap between anecdotal knowledge and systematic insights has never been more pronounced. Nerd Apply addresses this challenge by aggregating over 100,000 fully de-identified admissions outcomes shared by counselors across 500+ organizations, creating the world’s largest qualitative dataset that captures not just test scores and GPAs, but the essays, activities, and context that actually shape college decisions. The platform enables counselors to benchmark students against real applicants, ground family conversations in patterns rather than guesswork, and widen college list options beyond the same 80 ultra-selective schools dominating application strategies.
AlleyWatch sat down with Nerd Apply Cofounders Braden Weissman and Cooper Weissman to learn more about the business, the future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Nerd Apply raised a $3.2M Seed round. The round included Riverpark Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and a group of angel investors including Gokul Rajaram; David Krane, CEO and Managing Partner of Google Ventures; Jeff Crowe, Managing Partner of Norwest Ventures; Matt McIlwain, Managing Director of Madrona Ventures; and Chris Moore, Partner at Redpoint Ventures.
Tell us about the product or service that Nerd Apply offers.
Nerd Apply is a privacy-first data platform that helps college counselors guide students using real admissions outcomes rather than anecdotes or averages. With over 100,000 real applications in its dataset, the platform makes it easy to organize student information, understand admissions patterns, and share insights without exposing identities.
The team sees a long-term opportunity to build the foundational data platform for college admissions, similar to the role EPIC Systems plays in healthcare.
Nerd Apply brings together completed, de-identified admissions results so counselors can see how similar students actually fared. The product is designed to support real counseling conversations by making reasoning and evidence visible, without exposing individual student identities.
What inspired the start of Nerd Apply?
We saw how often college counseling relied on instinct and private anecdotes rather than shared outcomes families could actually see. Coming from public education and working closely with counselors, we understood how difficult it was to give confident guidance without concrete examples. Nerd Apply was built to responsibly bring de-identified admissions outcomes together, so counselors can ground high-stakes conversations in clarity, trust, and reality.
How is Nerd Apply different?
Nerd Apply is the only place counselors can see what actually happened in college admissions, with the student-level context that matters. Not just grades and scores, but extracurriculars, activities, and essays, all handled in a privacy-safe way. Instead of predictions or averages, counselors can look at real outcomes from similar students and use those examples in conversations with families. Nerd Apply does not replace existing counseling tools. It gives counselors a clear, organized way to track results after students apply and bring honest, real-world context into future guidance.
What’s your business model?
Nerd Apply is a subscription-based platform for college counseling organizations. Counselors and counseling firms pay to use the product to organize admissions results, understand outcomes, and support advising conversations. In addition, Nerd Apply works with districts, governments, and nonprofit foundations to provide de-identified, aggregate insights that help inform policy decisions and resource allocation. Student-level data is never sold, and identifiable information is not shared with colleges or commercial third parties.
What was the funding process like?
It was refreshing to see so many investors excited about edtech, given the challenges that have faced edtech companies in the past.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Investors were drawn to the scale and uniqueness of the data Nerd Apply is building. Today, most education data used by governments and institutions is purely quantitative, focused on metrics like attendance and graduation rates. That leaves out the context that actually shapes student outcomes. Nerd Apply is collecting a new kind of dataset that combines outcomes with qualitative context such as activities, essays, and experiences, all in a privacy-safe way. This creates a much clearer picture of how students navigate the admissions process and opens the door to better decision-making across counseling, education policy, and resource allocation.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Near-term milestones include expanding the size and diversity of the de-identified dataset, increasing counselor adoption and engagement, strengthening distribution beyond conference-based channels, and continuing to invest in product improvements that make outcomes data easier to use in real counseling workflows.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Over the near term, Nerd Apply is focused on becoming the trusted standard for privacy-safe admissions outcomes data. That means expanding adoption across counseling contexts, continuing to strengthen data governance and infrastructure, and building a sustainable growth engine in preparation for the next stage of the company.
