How Sprout Engineers Built Kollegio AI to Serve 300K+ Students
By Sprout Team · June 16, 2026 · 7 min read
Kollegio AI set out to do something simple to say and hard to build: give every student the guidance of a $10,000 college counselor, for free. Sprout's founder joined as founding engineer and built the core of the product. Here is how it came together and how it held up as it grew to more than 300,000 students.
The problem
Good college counseling is expensive, so the students who need it most usually go without. Kollegio wanted to close that gap with software: match students to the right colleges, give real feedback on their essays, surface scholarships they qualify for, and map out admission pathways. The hard part was making all of that feel personal, one student at a time, while running reliably for a very large and growing user base.
What we built
The core product was built in Next.js and Node.js. The main pieces:
- Personalized college matching that weighs a student's profile against thousands of schools.
- AI essay feedback that gives specific, useful notes rather than generic praise.
- Scholarship discovery that surfaces the awards a student actually qualifies for.
- Direct admission pathways that show a clear route in.
Each feature had to do real work for the individual student while staying fast and dependable at scale.
Keeping it stable at scale
The interesting engineering challenge with Kollegio was not any single feature. It was keeping the whole thing reliable as usage climbed into the hundreds of thousands. That meant clean data models, careful use of the AI calls so cost and latency stayed sane, and an architecture that could grow without a rewrite. This is the same discipline Sprout brings to scaling any MVP into a real product: build the foundation so growth does not break it.
The outcome
Kollegio is Stanford-backed and funded by Reach Capital, and it now serves more than 300,000 students. For Sprout, it is the clearest proof of how we work: build AI products that are genuinely useful to one user and still hold up when hundreds of thousands arrive. If you are building something in that shape, that is exactly what we do.