Meet Nerd Apply: Turning the College Admissions Black Box Into Real Data

Every year, Beyond Now Summit brings students face to face with people who've built something real. Founders, athletes, creators, and operators who are still early enough in their own stories to speak directly to a high school audience. That same spirit carries over to Summer Discovery, where high schoolers spend weeks immersed in college-level coursework and campus life, often while actively working through their own college search. Few speakers embody both worlds more than Cooper and Braden Weissman, the brother co-founders behind Nerd Apply, who brought their session to both Beyond Now and Summer Discovery.

From Frustrated Applicants to Founders

Braden and Cooper didn't set out to build a company, they set out to understand their own college applications. Nerd Apply grew out of their experience navigating the college admissions process together: Braden was a varsity athlete and student body president, while Cooper was building apps. The spark was something almost every applicant and every counselor has run into, the classic admissions scatterplot that shows a GPA and a test score for every applicant to a school, and nothing else. The moment a student with lower numbers gets in while a student with higher numbers gets denied, the whole picture stops making sense, because the tools available never showed the rest of the story behind the student.

That gap between the data and the real story is what Cooper and Braden set out to close. Their own path wasn't a straight line either, the brothers have spoken openly about leaving Dartmouth and a Miami medical school admission, and taking on real financial risk, to go all-in on building the largest qualitative dataset in college admissions history.

What Nerd Apply Actually Does

Nerd Apply is a college admissions data platform that helps counselors centralize historical information and explore real, de-identified student profiles containing both academic and nonacademic context. Instead of relying on rankings, rumors, or last year's anecdotes, counselors can search completed admissions outcomes from students across the country and find real, comparable examples for the students they're advising.

The scale of what they've built is the headline: Nerd Apply is trusted by more than 500 counselors and is powered by over 100,000 real applications, giving counselors a way to set clearer expectations, reduce family anxiety, and, most importantly, encourage students to look beyond the same narrow band of ultra-selective schools everyone assumes they need to get into.

The mission is personal for both founders. As Braden and Cooper put it, "students are making life-shaping decisions with incomplete or misleading information," and by aggregating real admissions outcomes from real students, Nerd Apply gives counselors the clarity to guide students with confidence.

Momentum That Backs Up the Mission

Nerd Apply isn't a classroom theory, it's a fast-growing company with real institutional backing. The company closed a $3.2 million seed round with participation from Riverpark Ventures, Alumni Ventures, 1.61 Ventures, and a group of angel investors including Gokul Rajaram and David Krane, CEO and Managing Partner of Google Ventures. That round has fueled a bigger swing at the mission: Nerd Apply has since made its platform free for counselors, betting that a broader community contributing to a living dataset will better reflect how admissions actually work today rather than relying on outdated benchmarks.

Why This Session Matters - At Beyond Now Summit and Summer Discovery

Whether it's a single afternoon at a Beyond Now Summit city stop or a multi-week Summer Discovery experience at UCLA, Cooper and Braden aren't just telling a founder story, they're opening up the data behind the process every student in the room is currently living through. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of real applications, they break down:

• The biggest myths about what actually gets students into selective schools
• What separates a winning essay from a forgettable one, beyond just good writing
• Which extracurriculars admissions officers genuinely reward, versus the ones students assume matter more
• How to build a personal narrative that stands out on paper, not just in person

The two settings play to different strengths. At Beyond Now Summit, Cooper and Braden bring a high-energy, single-session format. A fast, data-driven wake-up call for students who may only get one shot to hear this message before application season. At Summer Discovery, students get to sit with the material longer: alongside their coursework and campus experience, they have time to dig into their own applications-in-progress and ask follow-up questions in a smaller, more personal setting.

In both settings, every attendee who joins their session walks away with a personalized admissions positioning report — real, data-backed insight into where they already stand out, and where a few smart changes could make the biggest difference before applications go in.

The Takeaway

Cooper and Braden built Nerd Apply because they lived the exact confusion their session is designed to fix. For Beyond Now Summit and Summer Discovery students alike, that means a rare chance to hear from founders who are actively reshaping how an entire industry uses data, and to leave with something practical for their own applications, not just inspiration.