Enlighten Lab

Educators buildingfor educators.

An AI solutions company for education, built by people who've done the job themselves.

Partnering with Occidental College for the 2026-27 application cycle.

The Lab

We've spent our careers in education. Now we're building its tools.

We're not guessing at what educators need. We've been the ones who needed it.

We've taught, counseled, advised, and run admissions reading rooms. We build the tools we wished we'd had, from experience instead of assumptions.

Everyone can reach for the same models now. Far fewer people know what "right" looks like for a transcript or a reading queue, or have had to stand behind that judgment in committee.

So we don't ship novelty. We encode expertise that's hard to fake, and we sweat the details that matter to the people using the tool.

Our tools behave the way good educators do: calm, transparent, and deferential to the person using them. No magic, no mascots, no software that treats a professional like a data-entry clerk.

RITA is the first tool out of the lab. It won't be the last.

RITA, our first tool

AI that reads and evaluates the transcript, so your readers can focus on the student.

AI reads. Rules rate. Readers decide. RITA turns a transcript, in whatever format the high school sends, into structured courses and grades, then rates rigor and achievement with rules your office configures, in the context of each high school and what it offers.

RITA can help teams norm, but admissions officers make the final decision, and it never weighs in on who gets in. It makes readers faster, more consistent, and less tired, and gives your office an earlier start on outreach.

Reads the mess: Single or bulk transcripts, whatever the format.
Knows each school: Matched to each high school's offerings, plus the student's Common App course data.
Shows its work: Open any rating and see the math behind it.
Stays editable: Fix any course inline, without losing your place.

Visit ritareader.ai →

The Team

Admissions expertise and analytics expertise, in one team.

When a reading team has a question mid-season, it goes to someone who has sat in the same chair.

Julie Fulton

Co-founder & Chief Product Officer

More than 20 years in college admissions, including redesigning Occidental College's review structure and training its readers. Previously led curriculum design and prompt engineering for an LLM product.

Andrew Marotta

Co-founder & CEO

PhD in education, with a focus in social and emotional learning and a foundation in counseling psychology. Brings AI strategy and analytics experience from Qualtrics, building enterprise AI programs and measuring what they deliver.

Geo Guidetti

Co-founder & CTO

End-to-end engineer who builds full software platforms, from infrastructure to interface. Designs RITA's architecture, security, and data controls.

Matthew Gross

Strategic Advisor

Thirty years in education policy, entrepreneurship, and product development. Co-founder and CEO of Grouper Education. Founded and led Newsela, which has served more than 40 million teachers and students, and co-led the development of EngageNY. Began his career as a Teach For America music teacher in the South Bronx.

Looking Ahead

Learning can be so much more.

We didn't build this company to shave minutes off busywork, though we're glad to do that too. We built it because education is one of the most human things we do, and technology, used with care and taste, can make it richer: more curious, more personal, more alive. We come at the work from many angles at once, with backgrounds in teaching and counseling, engineering and design, research and the arts. We aim all of it at one question: not how to add more AI, but how to help people learn, teach, and grow in ways that feel meaningfully better. We're grounded in research and unafraid of imagination, and we're only getting started.

Assess

We learn your work first: the pain points, the routines, and how your team works with technology today.

Strategize

We define measurable outcomes together and design an approach built for your people, not a template.

Implement

We build it and put it in your team's hands, with people in control at every step.

Educate

We make sure your team can use it with confidence, and we stay on as your needs grow.

And underneath every step, one test: five questions.

This is the ethical spine of the lab, drawn from peer-reviewed research that keeps finding the same thing: AI that hands people answers erodes their skills, while AI that shows its reasoning and defers to human expertise makes people better at their work. Every idea we build runs this protocol first.

1.Whose judgment is this?

2.What should the human get better at?

3.Can they see why?

4.Who could this quietly harm?

5.How will we know it worked?

A weak answer to any one of them means we redesign before we write a line of code.

So tell us what you would change.

What would make learning feel more alive for your students or your team?
Where does meaningful work get buried under the busywork?
What have you always wished technology could do, and never found?

There are no wrong answers. The best ideas often start as an offhand "what if we could..." Bring us yours.

Share an idea →

How We Build

Built for FERPA. We never train on student data.

Student records are protected information, and we handle them that way: used only to perform the service, never to train a model, and each institution's data is isolated from every other's. It's a commitment written into our contracts, not a marketing line.

ii.

The work is always visible.

Every rating opens to its full reasoning: each course counted, each rule that fired. A reader has to defend it in committee.

iii.

The expert stays in charge.

Our tools assist judgment; they don't replace it. Admissions officers make every decision, and every action in RITA's review queue is logged.

iv.

Calm beats clever.

We'd rather a tool disappear into good work than announce itself. No confetti, no jargon, no ceremony. Just the tedious or time-consuming parts, done well.

Clear limits.

We don't analyze essays or recommendation letters. Those belong to human readers. RITA works alongside admissions software like Slate rather than replacing it.

If you build for educators, or fund people who do, let's talk.

We work closely with educators to understand the challenges, then design the solutions together. If that's how you like to build, we want to work with you.

hello@enlightenlab.ai