Hear every student
Give students thoughtful, age-appropriate opportunities to reflect by voice or text—not only when they have a meeting or know how to ask for help.
About Addie
Every student heard. Every counselor free to truly counsel.
Addie is a force multiplier for college counselors working in high schools. Students reflect in their own voice. Addie connects that voice with teacher comments, counselor knowledge, school records, and student work. Counselors enter the moments that matter with a living Student Ledger—and more time for judgment, guidance, and relationships.
The Student Ledger connects the whole story.
StudentsTime and space to say what matters
AddieOne longitudinal record across grades 9–12
CounselorsContext ready for deeply human guidance
Our mission
Make sure every student is heard—and every counselor has the opportunity to truly counsel.
College counselors do not need another system that creates more work. They need a way to listen continuously, connect what the school already knows, and apply scarce human time where expertise and relationships matter most.
Connect the full story
Bring student voice, teacher evidence, counselor notes, school records, writing, and progress into one school-controlled Student Ledger.
Multiply human counseling
Prepare counselors for meetings, fit guidance, recommendations, decisions, and follow-up so more time goes toward the student—not reconstructing the record.
Who we serve
Built for the people responsible for helping students become who they are.
Addie serves college counseling teams and the students they guide across the full four-year secondary-school experience.
College counseling teams
Directors and counselors who want to know students more deeply, enter high-value work prepared, and maintain continuity across a full caseload.
High schools and upper schools
Independent, public, and international schools building a coherent grades 9–12 counseling program around student voice, fit, belonging, and future direction.
Students in grades 9–12
Young people who deserve time to think out loud, recognize how they are changing, test possible futures, and be understood as more than a transcript.
One program. Four years.
Understanding compounds before application pressure begins.
Addie does not start college admissions in ninth grade. It builds the reflective and relational foundation that makes later advising, fit, recommendations, applications, and transition more accurate and more human.
Belonging, learning, trusted relationships, contribution, and transition.
Values in action, strengths, possible futures, and small experiments.
Sustainable performance, fit, story evidence, list direction, and support.
Applications, recommendations, decisions, transition, and legacy.
The Addie team
Education operators, product builders, and engineers working directly with schools.
Addie is built by repeat education founders and a full-time product and engineering team. The team’s standard is simple: solve real counseling problems, ship what schools will actually use, and make ambitious AI feel dependable in ordinary school life.
Andrew Howard
Co-founder & CEOAndrew Howard is Addie’s co-founder and CEO, and he has spent more than 20 years building education companies around the belief that personalization should be real, not a marketing adjective. Before Addie, he co-founded Brain Hurricane and Wowzers, including growing one EdTech company to roughly $15 million in ARR. He spent nearly two years working with schools and interviewing more than 200 counselors before commercial sales, which is why Addie is built around actual counseling workflows rather than founder imagination. Andrew can move from educational equity to unit economics without changing gears, and he is still willing to kill a beautiful feature when customers do not need it.
Kevin Nguyen
Co-founder & Product LeadKevin Nguyen is Addie’s co-founder and Product Lead, responsible for product strategy, engineering priorities, and turning school feedback into software that ships. Before Addie, he led the Presence web CMS product at SchoolMessenger and built experience scaling education software inside a roughly $70 million ARR business. He brings the rare combination of systems thinking, product judgment, and enough technical fluency to make informed tradeoffs without treating every new AI capability as a roadmap. Kevin is often the person asking whether an idea is a platform advantage or just a clever demo, which is a useful distinction when capital is finite.
Kelly Romanovicz
Chief Growth OfficerKelly Romanovicz is Addie’s Chief Growth Officer and brings approximately 20 years of experience across K–12 education, mental health, school safety, and behavioral health markets. At eTherapy, she built the sales engine, introduced CRM discipline, hired a team, and helped grow ARR from roughly $8 million to $15 million in about 18 months. She now leads Addie’s move from founder-led selling to a repeatable school go-to-market system, with particular strength in trust-sensitive buying, public-sector funding, grants, RFPs, and channel strategy. Kelly describes herself as obsessed with numbers and sales but heart-centered in how she sells, which is about right for a company serving educators and students.
Jose Oliveros
Chief Founding EngineerJose Oliveros is Addie’s Chief Founding Engineer and leads the architecture, backend, AI infrastructure, data systems, and integrations behind the platform. His professional north star is straightforward: build AI systems that work at scale in production, not merely in a polished demonstration. He studied deep learning, reinforcement learning, and natural-language processing at the University of Texas at Austin before applying that training to the less academic challenge of making AI dependable for real schools. Jose’s job is to make Addie’s most ambitious technology feel boringly reliable, which is one of the highest compliments an infrastructure engineer can receive.
Shengge “Dempsey” Zhang
Frontend EngineerShengge “Dempsey” Zhang is Addie’s Frontend Engineer, responsible for turning voice conversations, AI outputs, and longitudinal student data into clear student and counselor experiences. Before moving into software development, Dempsey worked in technical recruiting and completed graduate study at the University of Toronto, creating an unusual understanding of both technology and the people who build it. Dempsey’s project experience includes Next.js, TypeScript, the Vercel AI SDK, Supabase, streaming interfaces, browser extensions, and responsive full-stack applications. At Addie, Dempsey makes the difficult technology disappear behind interfaces that feel intuitive, which is generally how you know the frontend is doing its job.
Baber Javed
AI & Systems EngineerBaber Javed is Addie’s AI & Systems Engineer, focused on backend engineering, multilingual voice infrastructure, and the agentic systems that make Addie feel conversational rather than scripted. He trained at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences and has built SaaS, web, mobile, and custom software through his work with Square63. At Addie, Baber makes real-time conversations, telephony, AI orchestration, safety logic, and production reliability work together as one system. His standard is not whether an AI demo looks impressive, but whether it still works on an ordinary Tuesday morning when thousands of students need it.
Advisory team
Built with the practitioners who live the work—and the science that keeps the product honest.
Our advisors make sure Addie fits real counseling practice, preserves human judgment, and earns the confidence of schools, families, and students.
Practitioner advisor
Ari Worthman
Director of College Counseling · Lakeside School
Ari Worthman is Director of College Counseling at Lakeside School and brings more than 20 years of experience in college counseling and admissions. He joined Lakeside in 2012 after serving as Assistant Director of Admissions at Haverford College and Senior Associate Director of College Counseling at Pine Crest School, and he has held national leadership positions including chairing the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools. As an Addie advisor and early design partner, Ari pressure-tests recommendation writing, counselor notes, follow-up questions, student adoption, privacy, and implementation in real school workflows. He combines national-level admissions expertise with the healthy skepticism of a practitioner who can immediately detect whether a product saves counselors time or merely gives them another tab to manage.
Practitioner advisor
Kelly Herrington
Director of College Counseling and Student Services · University Prep
Kelly Herrington is Director of College Counseling and Student Services at University Prep, where he leads a student-centered program focused on helping young people find colleges where they will genuinely thrive. A former admissions counselor with deep experience in selective admissions, he also founded Camp College, an early-intervention program supporting first-generation, college-bound students. As an Addie advisor, Kelly pressure-tests essay brainstorming, meeting preparation, counselor notes, student reflection, school-fit guidance, and the implementation details required for sustained adoption. He jokes that “It depends” may belong on his tombstone, but that instinct reflects the nuance and judgment great college counseling actually requires.
Psychology & AI advisor
Benjamin Lira Luttges
Psychologist, Wharton Postdoctoral Scholar & Penn AI FellowPsychographic rigor
Benjamin Lira Luttges is a psychologist and AI researcher studying when artificial intelligence strengthens human capability and when it quietly undermines it. He is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Wharton School and a Penn AI Fellow, working with Angela Duckworth, Lyle Ungar, and Stefano Puntoni after earning his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. At Addie, Ben advises on psychographic rigor, evidence quality, measurement, equity, safety boundaries, and how confidently the product should state what it believes it understands about a student. Put less formally, Ben keeps Addie from mistaking an eloquent model output for a psychological fact, which may be the most valuable kind of skepticism an AI company can have.
Students, counselors, and science remain in the loop.
The future of counseling should be more human
Give every student a way to be heard—and every counselor the context to act.
See how Addie can strengthen the counseling work already happening at your school across grades 9–12.