Pathly has been named a 2026 South Carolina InnoVision Awards finalist in the Community Enrichment category, recognizing our work to expand access to personalized college and career guidance for high school students. An independent panel of out-of-state judges chose Pathly as one of just 18 competitive finalists statewide, and one of three organizations in the Community Enrichment category.
The recognition comes a little more than a year after Pathly began in Lancaster, South Carolina, with one student trying to answer a deceptively difficult question: What should I do after high school? Today, students in at least 24 states are using Pathly as we build an AI native guidance platform designed not only for students, but for the schools and counselors helping them prepare for what comes next.
A Student Problem That Became a Much Bigger Opportunity
Pathly started with my daughter and co-founder, Grace. As Grace began navigating high school, dual enrollment, careers, colleges, and life after graduation, we saw firsthand how fragmented the process could be. There was plenty of information available, but what was missing was guidance that could connect her interests, strengths, values, and goals to the enormous number of opportunities in front of her.
As Grace has put it, “Students cannot pursue paths they do not know exist.” That student perspective remains deeply embedded in Pathly, but we quickly learned that the challenge was much larger than one student.
Across the country, school counselors juggle careers, college, financial aid, graduation planning, scheduling, testing, and student wellbeing, often in the same week. The ASCA National Model recommends that counselors spend 80 percent or more of their time in direct and indirect services to students, yet everything else on that list competes for the same hours. Personalized guidance matters. Protecting the time to deliver it is the challenge.
Building an AI-Native Guidance Platform
Most college and career platforms started as administrative systems. Their job was to track requirements, document plans, and satisfy reporting, and they added AI later. Pathly started from the student.
The platform helps students understand themselves, explore careers and education pathways, ask questions, save possibilities, and turn what they learn into living, personalized roadmaps. Students can explore traditional two- and four-year colleges alongside technical education, certifications, apprenticeships, entrepreneurship, military service, and direct-to-career opportunities.
What matters most is what happens as that exploration continues. Every time a student explores a career, saves a program, changes direction, or completes a milestone, Pathly builds a richer understanding of that student’s interests, goals, and direction. As that understanding develops, the guidance becomes more relevant to that student.
Over four years of high school, that record can become a picture of a student that no single conversation or point-in-time assessment can produce. Building that continuity is the work we care most about, and our approach to it is patent pending. That continuity is possible because the student owns the account. The record belongs to the student rather than a school information system, allowing it to follow them from ninth grade through graduation and into whatever comes after.
For schools and districts, Pathly adds a second layer through tools that give counselors visibility into student engagement, interests, progress, and planning. That changes the starting point of the counselor conversation. Instead of beginning with “What do you want to do after high school?” a counselor can begin with context. Students arrive further along, and counselors spend their time where it matters most.
From Student Adoption to Guidance at Scale
Pathly is free for individual students. That is a decision about access, but it is also how the platform grows. A student can create a free Pathly account on their own without waiting for a district contract, rollout, or purchase order. Adoption starts with the student and moves toward the institution, not the other way around.
Schools and districts then layer on the tools built for counseling teams, including visibility into assessment completion, career and education exploration, saved opportunities, roadmap progress, student goals, and engagement across a counselor’s caseload. That gives counseling teams better information for college, career, and Individual Graduation Plan conversations, along with a clearer view of which students may need additional attention.
Pathly exists to give every student more room to explore while giving counselors more of their time back for the conversations only they can have.
Why the InnoVision Recognition Matters
Founded in 1999, the South Carolina InnoVision Awards recognize innovation and technological excellence across the state. For the 2026 awards, an impartial panel of independent judges from outside South Carolina chose three finalists in each of six competitive categories.
Pathly’s recognition came in the newly created Community Enrichment Award, which combines InnoVision’s former Education and Community Service categories and recognizes innovations that improve quality of life in South Carolina through expanded educational opportunity, community health, or cultural enrichment. That makes Pathly one of the first three finalists ever selected for the Community Enrichment Award.
InnoVision announced the finalists August 25 at the Meet the Finalists reception at the Palmetto Club in Columbia, sponsored by the South Carolina Research Authority. Pathly is an SCRA Member Company and grant recipient, so being in that room meant something to us.
In its official finalist announcement, InnoVision highlighted Pathly’s AI-native approach, our Lancaster father and daughter founding story, personalized living roadmaps, and the school and district tools we’re building to deliver individualized guidance at scale. For us, that combination matters because Pathly is deeply student-centered, but the opportunity is much larger than a student application. We’re building guidance infrastructure that can help schools provide a more personalized experience to every student without requiring counselors to somehow find more hours in the day.
Built in South Carolina. Designed for a Much Bigger Problem.
We’re proud that Pathly was built in Lancaster and is the only 2026 InnoVision finalist from York or Lancaster counties. What we did not expect was how quickly students outside South Carolina would find us. Pathly now has students in at least 24 states, without paid student acquisition.
That early adoption reinforces something we believed when we started: the guidance gap isn’t unique to one school, district, or state. Students everywhere are being asked to make consequential decisions about their futures while navigating an overwhelming number of options, while schools are trying to provide meaningful guidance with limited time and resources. We believe there is a better way to connect the two.
InnoVision will name the 2026 winners at the 28th Annual InnoVision Awards Celebration on November 5 at the Thornblade Club in Greer, South Carolina. Being recognized among South Carolina’s innovators is an honor, but more importantly, it gives us another opportunity to bring this conversation to the schools, districts, counselors, workforce organizations, and partners working every day to help students prepare for what comes next.
See What Pathly Could Look Like in Your School or District
If you’re a school counselor, administrator, CTE leader, district leader, workforce development professional, or college and career readiness leader, you can learn how Pathly supports counselors or schedule a personalized walkthrough for your school or district.
See how students use Pathly to explore their futures and how counselors gain the visibility and context to turn that exploration into better conversations and clearer next steps.
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