Hi, I’m Nikita. If you’ve ever lost a scholarship to an open tab, this is for you.

I’m a 17-year-old senior in San Antonio. Meriqen didn’t start as a company idea — it started as the mess on my own laptop.

You know the routine. I lived it too.

It starts with a search: “scholarships for high school seniors.” Forty tabs later you’ve got a list from a website that hasn’t been updated since your older cousin graduated, three awards that turn out to be for a different state, one that expired last spring but still shows up on every list, and one that looked perfect — until paragraph six, where it quietly says your school can only nominate one student, and nominations closed in October.

Then comes the filling. The same information, typed into every single portal like it’s the first time anyone’s asked: name, GPA, activities, hours, that one leadership role you have to re-explain in 200 characters or less. Again. And again.

Then the writing. It’s 11pm on a school night and you’re staring at “Describe a challenge you overcame” with a 500-word limit, wondering if you can reshape the essay you wrote for the last one — knowing it doesn’t quite fit, and that the judges can probably tell.

And underneath all of it, the deadlines. Every scholarship keeps its own calendar. Some post it. Some change it without telling anyone. The local ones — often your best odds — sometimes never put it online at all; the date lives with a counselor or a community group, and if nobody mentions it to you, that’s that. My sister went through all of this four years before me. She’s one of the hardest-working people I know, and I still watched her find out about awards after they closed. Not because she wasn’t trying. Because the system is built to be forgotten.

That’s the part that got to me. Nobody loses a scholarship because they weren’t good enough for it. They lose it on a Tuesday, quietly, because a deadline passed in a tab they closed three weeks ago.

So I built the guide we all needed.

I’d built things before — I founded Calyqen, a tech project; I lead free workshops for SA Youth SOAR students through Caly Cares; I run Akki’s Cupcakery and we donate our profits to children’s charities here in San Antonio. Building things taught me one lesson over and over: the distance between “someone should fix this” and “I’ll fix it” is shorter than it looks.

So I started building Meri. The name is exactly what it sounds like: Meri comes from merit — because these awards are earned by what you’ve actually done, not by what your family makes. And she’s an elephant because elephants never forget, and forgetting is how scholarships are lost. Put together, Meriqen carries the name of the family of tools I’ve built — Calyqen came first — and the promise this one makes: your merit, remembered.

What Meri actually does about it.

The finding: she matches scholarships to your real profile and tells you why each one fits — and when one isn’t for you, she says so, with the reason, so you never spend a weekend on an application you were never eligible for.

The trust: every award shows its official source and the date a person last verified it. No zombie listings from three years ago.

The deadlines: verified dates, one calendar, reminders that arrive when you set them. And for the local awards that never post a date? Meri tells you who to ask and by when — because she can’t watch a page that doesn’t exist, and she’s honest about that too.

The writing: she helps you pick your strongest true story and strengthen your draft — and she checks each scholarship’s own rules about AI help first. Some contests don’t allow it; for those, she’ll organize and remind, and the words stay 100% yours.

And what she’ll never do.

She never submits for you. Never invents facts about your life. Never claims to know your odds — anyone who promises you’ll win is selling something. Your story is yours. Meri just makes sure it gets where it needs to go, on time.

What we believe.

Meriqen is in private beta — a small group of students using it for their real applications this year and telling us what to fix. If you’ve lived any paragraph on this page, come join us.