Scholly: app from student who won $1.3M in scholarships, helps you find your own

Search for scholarships that are relevant to you with mobile app Scholly.

The app comes from two college students and one recent graduate, including one who’s an expert on the topic of scholarships: Dorm Room Fund member Christopher Gray, a rising Drexel University fourth-year who secured $1.3 million in dozens of scholarships during his senior year of high school. Gray manually created the scholarship database that the app searches, said cofounder Nick Pirollo.

Designed for high school seniors, undergraduates and graduates, the app lets you save  and export a list of relevant scholarships and shows examples of winning essays. The Scholly team manually updates the database when scholarship deadlines have passed but are working on an automated system, Pirollo said.

Users can’t apply for scholarships through the app, but that’s in the works, he said.

Pirollo, 23, an electrical and computer engineering major who graduated this spring, previously helped develop Whims, the mobile app that aims to be Instagram for words, and TagItBest, an hashtag optimizer.

The third cofounder, Bryson Alef, is a rising senior at Amherst College and a Coca-Cola Scholar.