Vilnius-Based Unive Raises EUR 410K to Level the College Admissions Playing Field with AI-Powered Guidance

• Unive AI raised EUR 410K, including Pre-Seed investment from FIRSTPICK and a grant from EduChallenger, to expand its AI-driven admissions platform
• Launched by globally educated Lithuanian founders, Unive merges AI tools with expert human admissions guidance
• The startup aims to democratize access to college counselling, starting with the complex US market
• The funding will boost AI features, global expansion, and long-term plans beyond admissions into careers

This September, Unive AI—the Lithuanian AI-powered college counselling platform—attracted  a EUR 350K Pre-Seed round of investment from the well-known Lithuanian VC fund FIRSTPICK (invested in Skarbe, among others). This adds to Unive’s EUR 60K grant from EduChallenger, altogether comprising EUR 410K of funding.

A Globally Educated Founding Team

Unive was started earlier this year by a diverse co-founding team. Jonas Kavaliauskas (CEO) is a Yale graduate with a BA in Economics and Computer Science and also earned a Master’s degree in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar. He has a background in investing, having worked for two years in a family office and one year in venture capital, and in education, running his own admissions consultancy, Atlas Academy, for eight years. At Unive, he is also in charge of business development.

Tomas Maksimovič (Head of Data) graduated from the University of Edinburgh. He previously worked in bioinformatics at a pharmaceutical company and in data science within venture capital. Marcin Pauksztello (CTO) studied Entrepreneurship at Coventry University and is currently studying AI at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. His professional experience spans full-stack development and AI engineering. Markas Aišparas (Head of AI and ML) graduated in Computer Science from TU Delft and has several years of experience as a game developer and startup founder. He has been coding since the age of seven and was Atlas Academy’s first student.

All co-founders studied outside of Lithuania at top universities across the world. They had to navigate the application processes firsthand and thus wanted to build something to serve students and educators by leveraging AI. After testing the concept at a hackathon, they gained a clear vision of how well they work together to make a big impact even with the earliest versions the tool they came up with could have. This convinced them to focus on the Unive project full-time.

To Making Admissions Accessible

What the team has built is an AI-powered college and career counselling platform that guides students throughout the admissions process and beyond. It combines data-driven AI support with insights from experienced admissions professionals, helping students identify the best-fit schools, refine essays, prepare for interviews, and secure scholarships.

Unive sees its mission in making the increasingly complex and costly admissions process more accessible, as rising application volumes and falling acceptance rates make private counselling expensive. By pairing AI-driven tools with expert review from specialists at institutions like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, Unive ensures high-quality guidance while streamlining the journey for students.

The Shared Vision of AI-Driven Democratization

This rhymes with FIRSTPICK’s vision of the democratizing mission of AI in entrepreneurship, as stated by the fund’s partner Andra Bagdonaite:

‘AI is democratizing entrepreneurship, lowering barriers for diverse founders to bring groundbreaking ideas to market. It’s also changing the VC world, making funding decisions more data-driven and equitable. If used effectively, AI could level the playing field, allowing startups with strong fundamentals to shine — regardless of their background or geography.’

According to Mr Kavaliauskas, Unive employs AI to democratize higher education in general and the admissions process in particular in a similar way:

‘We provide access to the platform free of charge for students and families that can’t afford it. We simply ask for proof of eligibility. Right now, it’s a manual check, but we hope to be able to handle all such cases at scale with the help of AI soon enough. For the moment, we’re scaling mostly in the US and assume similar levels of technology literacy among our target audience – high school students. Once we begin to scale internationally, we’ll be working hard to bridge the gaps in technology literacy and between different cultural contexts.’

From the USA Toward Global Scaling

The team chose to begin with the US market because the US university application process is more extensive and complex than that offered even by the most selective of European universities. For example, an applicant to 10 top-tier universities in the United States should expect to write around 30 pages of supplemental essays, undergo several interviews and face many more hurdles along the way, compared to a single personal statement and usually one interview when applying to UK universities, including Oxford or Cambridge.

This means that once Unive fully cracks the US application process, scaling to other parts of the world should be easy from a product-tech standpoint.

‘The US application process is also more holistic in nature, giving more weight to extracurricular profiles, and this can’t be easily built up last-minute. Hence, many students join Unive already in their junior year of high school, working heavily with our extracurricular agent, which gives them structured guidance on extracurricular profile build-up, internships, university summer program applications and more, and allows them to compare their profiles to their cohort,’ Mr Kavaliauskas specifies.

Adapting to a Changing Admissions Landscape

Seeing how the admissions landscape is continuously evolving (e.g., changing criteria, holistic reviews, test-optional trends), adapting to such shifts may pose a challenge. However, according to the Unive’s CEO, despite some minor changes and SAT optionality that was in place for a few years due to COVID (and was kept on by certain universities), most admissions processes exhibit very little change from year to year, and many have stayed virtually the same for several decades.

As it appears, the core components of American, British, and most European university applications remained unchanged for the last decade, except, or standardized testing optionality and digitization nuances. As a result, the pressure to constantly adjust to changing admissions processes is less intense than it might appear.

‘Given that our core team has long-time admissions veterans, and we also have a network of some of the top admissions consultants around the globe working with Unive students, we’re constantly at the forefront of any changes and are able to adapt as needed,’ Mr Kavaliauskas adds.

Impact Beyond Admission Rates

To validate the quality of advice given beyond the admission rate, the Unive team also looks at the time spent on the platform per user, user retention, and other metrics. According to Mr Maksimovič, the facts that (a) the average student on Unive falls into the 90th percentile of all US students based on GPA and standardized test scores, and that (b) these highly motivated, organized, and well-informed applicants choose to spend several hours on this platform each day, week after week, reveals how these young people derive value from the services that the platform provides.

‘We’re hearing the same from customer interviews and reviews. We think this speaks volumes to Unive being able to greatly improve the application experience itself, not just the end goal of admission results,’ Mr Maksimovič continues.

Growth Plans and Further Steps Beyond Admissions

The EUR 410K of fresh funding is meant to help Unive grow its engineering, sales, and marketing teams, enhance AI features, and expand global outreach. With this support, the team is fully focused on building the best app for helping students navigate college applications. Further plans include releasing more AI agents to cover most European country applications, and cater not just to college applicants, but younger high school students and people already enrolled in college. Simultaneously, Unive also works on B2B partnerships with universities to provide them with tools for better recruitment and retention management.

Further ahead, as students whom Unive successfully counselled graduate, Unive envisions becoming more than an admissions platform. This vision includes building a one-stop shop with tools for college students to help them up their essay-writing skills, navigate internship applications, and career choices, and easily apply for scholarships.

‘We foresee students working with us for 8-9 years, the entirety of their high school and university careers. At that point, we’ll have more data on them than almost any other platform, and will be able to offer especially tailored advice and guidance on their next steps, potentially matching them with best-fit jobs and empowering them to excel in their early professional careers. By knowing the students’ strengths, weaknesses, interests, understanding their psychometric profiles, and overlaying this with labour market data, we’ll be able to give them much needed feedback on the increasingly fast-paced and constantly changing job market dynamics,’ Mr Kavaliauskas shares.

AI-powered platforms like Unive represent a decisive movement toward democratizing college admissions, making personalized guidance accessible to students regardless of their financial and other background. By combining data-driven insights with expert human mentorship, such tools reduce inequality in opportunities and empower more young people internationally to pursue education that truly fits their potential. As higher education continues to evolve, AI stands to become a catalyst for a fairer, more inclusive global admissions landscape.