Unive Raises €410K to Expand AI-Powered College Counseling Platform

Unive secures €410K in funding to scale its AI-driven college and career counseling platform, combining AI guidance with expert tutors to make admissions support efficient, equitable, and accessible to students worldwide.

Unive, an AI-driven college and career counseling platform, has secured €350,000 in funding from Firstpick VC this July, and an additional €60,000 grant from EduChallenger this September. On Unive’s platform, students can engage with a mix of AI agents and human tutors to navigate every stage of the college admissions process, from selecting best-fit schools and revising essays to practicing interview skills and finding scholarships. With their new funding, Unive plans to build out its engineering, sales, and marketing teams, refine its AI features, and expand outreach to students worldwide. 

Unive’s mission is to address an increasingly challenging and costly college admissions process. With the college applicant pool growing by about 5% each year and acceptance rates dropping, in some cases to below 4%, private college counselors can charge anywhere from $100s per hour up to $750,000 overall.

Such high costs leave many talented students without access to adequate support, says Jonas Kavaliauskas, Unive’s Co-Founder and CEO. “As the cost of private admissions counseling has gone up in recent years, we see a clear need for tools that make the application process both efficient and equitable. Our mission is to level the playing field by making high-quality college and career guidance accessible for all students, regardless of their financial circumstances.”

Combining AI guidance with expert advising

Unive builds on the traditional model of college counseling by combining AI technology with support from experienced admissions tutors. After students use Unive’s AI agents to manage the bulk of the work, receive feedback on essays, strengthen their extracurricular and professional profiles, and prepare for interviews, human experts from top institutions such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford step in to provide final reviews or additional guidance. “AI now outperforms human tutors on most tasks in the application process, and this gap will only widen with time,” Jonas Kavaliauskas, “but a personal touch can still be highly valuable, so we make it available when needed.”

Alongside efficiency, the company puts a strong emphasis on ethical practices that are compliant with college policies on AI usage - the platform is designed to support the applicant, not do the work for them. “Our technology serves as an advisor and guide rather than doing everything for the student,” he explains. “Unive helps students improve and organize their applications, but each part still reflects the student’s own efforts, voice, and ideas.”

In addition to its student-facing platform, Unive is growing its B2B offerings. The company now partners with universities to help institutions improve how they recruit and select students. "Our algorithms get to know the student really well and can find the best-match universities better than anyone else," says Kavaliauskas. “Over time, we'll be able to support both students and universities by matching individual strengths with institutional needs, helping students find the right fit and helping universities build more diverse and effective incoming classes.”