Nico Berlingeri

Founder

A hundred years ago, Iran built its first public schools. My great-grandfather, Abdolhossein Teymourtash, pushed them into existence as the country's first Minister of Court. In 1933 he was murdered in prison and the state took everything the family had. His two youngest daughters got out and reached New York as refugees. One of them is my grandmother. I grew up inside that story.

I got the education he fought to build. A scholarship paid for college, I studied computer science and math, and I have been building ever since. I was an AI researcher and electronic warfare specialist at MIT, then I built trading systems for a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund.

Momentum Labs is what I do with that. The bet is that the whole architecture of education can be rebuilt: one graph of what humanity knows, one lifelong intelligence per person reading it, and products that carry a person through the gates that decide a life. AdmissionsOS is the first one, because admissions is the gate where the gap between what a student is capable of and what happens to them is widest.

I cofounded The Haq Foundation, which puts girls in Afghanistan through school, and I run Nico's Nerds inside it. The foundation gets everything Momentum builds at cost.

Feiyang Liu

Founding counselor

I read first-year applications at UC Berkeley admissions, thousands of them, which is where I learned what actually separates a file that stands out from a file that reads like every other one. It is never the list of achievements. It is whether the application is a person.

As an Asian American high school student I did the opposite of that. I optimized for how things looked instead of what I cared about, and my application came out generic. That is probably why my top choice rejected me. I founded Your Epic Consulting to keep students from spending four years the way I spent mine, college-pleasing instead of showing who they are.

I run my own firm and I am Momentum's partner on the counseling side, which means the product is built around how I actually work. I sit with the families through the cycle and hold the judgment calls: what the narrative is, which schools are worth the slot, when an essay is not working and why. Every recommendation Sol makes gets checked against how I would have made it. If it does not hold up in front of a real family, it does not ship.

Your Epic Consulting runs on AdmissionsOS with my own students. Sol takes the research, the drafting and the deadline tracking off my desk, which is how I know what it can carry and where it still needs a counselor in the room.

UCLA class of '17, ex-UC Berkeley admissions, Master of Education from USC in '24, and a 2025 Bruin Business 100 honoree.

Zar The Star

Advisor

My name is Zar Khaibar. I am a stand-up comedian based in New York City, with over a million followers across social media, and I tour around the world.

Building an audience is the job. I work with brands and companies on how they show up on social: what to post, what people actually watch, and how a feed turns into a following that shows up for you. At Momentum Labs I do that for the marketing and social side, so the product reaches the families who need it.