Julia Dixon worked as an independent college counselor before she built an AI company. She had studied at the University of Michigan and spent years helping students apply to colleges, but she kept running into the same barrier. Most of the personalized support — the essay coaching, the school list guidance, the last-minute application edits — was only available to students from families who could afford private advising. Everyone else had to figure it out on their own. She started thinking about how to scale the kind of support she had been giving one-on-one.
Julia didn’t want to create a chatbot or a generic tool that just filled in blanks. She wanted something that could guide a student to do the real work of writing — something that would ask the right questions and help students shape their experiences into college-ready essays. She called it ESAI, short for “essay,” and launched the platform in 2023. The product offered a mix of prompt generation, topic exploration, and personal storytelling coaching, with guidance based on admissions officer insights and actual essay samples. The goal wasn’t to write the essay for the student. It was to help them find the story they wanted to tell and give them structure for telling it well.
Julia designed the system to sound more like a counselor than a machine. It asked reflective questions. It followed up. It responded differently based on where the student was applying and what kind of essay they were writing. Over time, she added more features — school list building, scholarship matching, and a tool that helped students who had been deferred write letters of continued interest. Everything stayed centered on the essay, but the system grew to support the full application process.
The platform was free to use, with optional upgrades, and Julia kept it open to anyone. That openness helped it grow quickly. By mid-2024, more than 350,000 students had used the platform, and the company raised about $1.25 million in seed funding. Most of the marketing was word-of-mouth or through social media. Julia posted tips and sample prompts on TikTok and Instagram, and students shared their own experiences with the platform. One of the company’s early posts — a walkthrough of what a strong topic sounds like — reached millions of views.
Julia built ESAI for students who didn’t already have an adult helping them through the application process. She saw the pressure, the confusion, and the blank pages that came with college essays, and she wanted to give students something that would walk beside them, not speak over them. The platform doesn’t generate finished work. It offers questions, feedback, and structure. She often describes ESAI as a personal tutor that never tells a student what to say, just helps them say it better.
By spring 2025, ESAI had added new features and was continuing to grow. Julia took the idea onto Shark Tank to reach a wider audience, but the core offering hadn’t changed. It was still an AI-guided tool for real students writing real stories — one that came directly from Julia’s time sitting across the table from students, helping them find a way to begin.
