About Katalyna
Applying to college is one of the highest-stakes things a seventeen-year-old will ever do, and the quality of help available is wildly unequal. Families who can afford a private consultant get someone who has read thousands of applications and knows exactly what a committee sees. Everyone else gets a school counselor stretched across hundreds of students, a search engine, and a lot of guessing.
Katalyna exists to close that gap. It brings the judgment of an experienced admissions reader — the candid read, the structural critique, the realistic school list — to anyone with a browser.
The line we won't cross
“There is an easy version of this product: one that writes the essay for you. We didn't build it, and we won't. An application that isn't yours is worth nothing — to the reader, and to you.”
What we believe
The essay has to be yours. Katalyna will challenge a weak opening, flag a claim that reads as overstated, and ask the question you're avoiding — but it will not write a sentence of your application. Ask it to, and it will say no and hand you a better way in.
A tool that tells every applicant they're competitive is worthless. We show real admit rates, real score bands, and real net prices — and we say plainly when a school is a reach. No one can guarantee an outcome, and we never pretend otherwise.
Your essays and grades are never used to train AI models, never sold, and never shared with admissions offices. You can export or permanently delete everything, any time.
Deadlines, school research, chances, cost, and drafts all inform each other. When you add a school, your calendar and research fill in. That connection is the whole point.
Who we serve
Balancing a list, finding an essay topic in an ordinary life, and keeping a dozen deadlines straight.
Where the math is different: LSAT and GPA medians, splitters and reverse splitters, addenda, and scholarship negotiation.
Navigating an unfamiliar system from the outside, where the unwritten rules are the hardest part to learn.
14 connected tools, including:
Who's behind Katalyna
Katalyna was built by a team of recent graduates and early-career researchers and engineers — people who navigated this process without a private consultant, got where they wanted to go, and were close enough to it afterwards to remember exactly where the help was missing.
Boston University
The people who built the school list, the deadline engine and the essay coaching applied to these schools themselves, not twenty years ago. They remember which parts of the process are genuinely confusing rather than which parts are supposed to be.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Every figure in Katalyna is traced to a primary source — federal Scorecard and IPEDS releases, Census earnings records, ABA filings — and the ingest pipelines that check and refuse bad data were written by people who do this for a living.
Stevens Institute of Technology
The workspace, the editor, the calendar and the security model that keeps your essays private are built by engineers who treat a student's unfinished draft as data worth protecting.
Where the team studied and worked
Institution names identify where members of our team studied or worked. They are the trademarks of their respective owners and appear here for identification only. Katalyna is an independent company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or otherwise connected to any institution named on this page.
[FOUNDER STORY — 2–3 sentences with real names and roles: who founded Katalyna, what they were doing before, and the specific moment that made them build it. This is the most-read paragraph on the page, and a named, specific story beats anything generic. Every credential named here should be one the person can evidence.]
[OPTIONAL: advisors, former admissions officers, or counselors you work with — naming real credentials here materially increases trust.]
Katalyna is built and operated by Katalyna Labs LLC418 Broadway Ste N, Albany, Albany County, NY 12207, US. Questions, feedback, or press: info@katalyna.app.
Build your profile in a few minutes — no account needed to begin, no paywall in your way.
Curious how we handle your essays and grades? Read the Privacy Policy — it's written to be read, not endured.