Verified admits, one hand-checked profile at a time
Brighton Ng built EC Database, a free platform where high-schoolers browse verified profiles of what university admits actually did outside the classroom. He hand-checks every profile before it goes live.
Thousands of students admitted to top universities post "how I got in" videos with their real stats, extracurriculars and awards. The information is public and close to useless, because it sits in unstructured video transcripts and scattered links. Brighton Ng built the thing that turns it into something a student can read.
EC Database is free. An agentic pipeline he wrote extracts every claim from a video, finds the applicant, and runs a rigorous web search to attach verified source links to each claim, a passion-project site, an organization's Instagram, whatever actually proves it. Then Brighton opens the profile himself and reviews it by hand before it goes live. The hand-check is the part he refuses to automate away, because a database of unverified claims is the problem he set out to fix. By the platform's own count, EC Database has reached 15,000 students in more than 120 countries.
I was that miserable student, watching admit videos at 1am, knowing I should be 'doing more' with no idea what more looked like.
Brighton Ng
The reason the project exists is personal. Brighton moved to Toronto in Grade 9 and describes those first weeks at Thornhill Secondary School plainly. By his figures, 1.5 million students apply to college every year and only 3 percent can afford a counselor, at an average package of $8,000. What eventually unlocked things for him was seeing exactly what students like him had actually done, and taking inspiration from it.
Before EC Database he co-founded a non-profit called INNOSpark that mentored grade 7 and 8 students across the York Region District School Board, then ran a global pitch competition judged by people from MaRS, Treefrog and Replit. He drives distribution for EC Database himself, through short-form video on a personal brand account, which is why the platform has spread without a budget behind it.
That one account is also the ceiling. What he wants next is a research pipeline that keeps adding verified profiles, hosting that does not depend on him, and student micro-influencers, so that reach stops resting on whether one teenager keeps posting.