Built by a student who needed it to exist.
The Gradovate story.
Gradovate started in a high school junior's bedroom in The Woodlands, Texas — because the existing options for students were either useless, dishonest, or both.
The problem
Every college matching tool in existence has the same flaw. They tell you your odds at Stanford. They tell you your odds at MIT. They tell you you have a 65% chance at Harvard. None of it is true. Holistic admissions don't work that way — they never have — but the tools sell certainty because certainty is what students want to hear. The result: confident students applying to wrong schools, anxious students writing off right schools, and parents trusting numbers that mean nothing.
What we built instead
Gradovate has two halves, working from the same live data. The first half is a grade tracker — connected to your school's gradebook in real time. It tells you exactly where you stand, class by class, GPA, rank. The second half is a match engine — but one that refuses to lie. We split colleges into four tiers based on what we can actually know. Tier 1 schools have public rank cutoffs (UT Austin, A&M, Texas Tech). We can tell you with certainty. Tier 4 schools are holistic (Stanford, Rice, MIT). We refuse to give a percentage. Honesty is the moat. Competitors fabricate odds. We don't.
Who built it
Gradovate is the work of one student, currently a senior at The Woodlands High School. Prior work: ONE-OFF Gaming (acquired at 16) and ClayScout (a recruiting platform that grew to 11,000+ athletes). Every feature in Gradovate exists because the founder needed it personally — and built it because nothing in the market did the honest thing.
What's next
The beta is currently invite-only, expanding district by district. The roadmap from here: more SIS modules, more districts, parent-tier monetization, and eventually B2B partnerships with schools that want to give every student a real college-readiness tool. The vision is simple: every student in America should have access to an honest read on where they stand and where they can go.
Contact
Press, partnerships, or beta interest? Email hello@gradovate.com