How Two First-Gen College Students Rewrote the College Admissions Playbook
By Kelli Luu | 09 Dec, 2025

Hanmei Wu and Changxiao Xie turned their experiences into helping students and families navigate college admissions with personalized support and affordable guidance with Empowerly.

For anyone who has ever been caught in the college admissions process, you know it can get stressful, but for many first-generation students, students born into immigrant families, or anyone without a support system, the process can feel nearly impossible. 

Fortunately that gap of guidance is no longer missing thanks to the development of Empowerly, one of the best college-counseling start ups and it was founded by two students who lived through those challenges themselves. 

Hanmei Wu and Changxiao Xie were both first-generation college students and family friends from Texas who attended UC Berkeley. In 2018, they decided that top-tier college guidance should not feel like a luxury and their solution to this issue would become what is known today as Empowerly. 

After graduating from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Wu went to work at Goldman Sachs before joining Teach For America where she was often finding herself helping students one-on-one outside of the classroom with FAFSA questions and college admissions. At the same time, Xie was navigating his own admissions process as he earned his spot at Princeton University to study electrical engineering. 

Wu and Xie put both their skillsets together and set off to create a model that would combine human counselors with data-driven tools to offer customized support for students. Rather than solely relying on a school’s busy counselor, Empowerly can match each student with experienced mentors and create a tailored roadmap for their college plans, something Wu, Xie, and many other students never had. 

Empowerly joined UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck accelerator in 2019, which was an extremely important factor for the company’s early growth and initial funding. In 2020, Empowerly secured over $1.6M in funding which would help expand their offerings, build their team, and perfect operations. From there, Empowerly’s momentum only continued to grow. 

In 2021 Wu and Xie were featured on Forbes 30 Under 30 List where they were recognized as leaders in the EdTech space and in 2022, over $10M in funding was raised to launch the Empowerly mobile app. That same year, the company recorded that 95% of their students gained admission to a top 50 U.S. college and that their admissions rates to top colleges were 11 times higher than the national average. 

Empowerly’s most recent funding round reached $30M in 2024, highlighting the company’s success and commitment to guiding students through the challenging admissions process. In less than a decade Hanmei Wu and Changxiao Xie have kept their promise to students that they’ll never have to navigate admissions alone and that promise is what will inspire the next generation to dream even bigger because they do have the right support in their corner.