Grace Brusky, 17, Wins South Carolina InnoVision Award With AI Platform Serving 24 States

GREER, S.C. — Grace Brusky made history at the Thornblade Club on November 5, walking away with South Carolina's top innovation prize before finishing high school. At 17 years old, the Lancaster native became the youngest recipient in the 28-year history of the South Carolina InnoVision Awards after judges selected her artificial intelligence platform, Pathly, for the Community Enrichment Award.

She beat seasoned regional contenders. ChemAu presented the trophy after Pathly edged out finalists including Greenville-based Dreamgarten and Clemson-based Quick Connect during an awards cycle that saw application volumes hit their highest mark since 2019. Brusky co-founded the enterprise alongside her father, Alan Brusky, designing software that steers students toward vocational, academic, and entrepreneurial tracks based on real-time assessments of individual aptitudes.

Bridging the School Guidance Gap Across 24 States

The platform targets an acute structural bottleneck in American public education: an overwhelming shortage of certified guidance staff. While the American School Counselor Association mandates a target ratio of 250 students per counselor, federal public school data reveals a national average standing at 372 to one.

Counselors are buried under caseloads. Pathly fills that structural vacuum by building dynamic digital roadmaps that map out college choices, trade certifications, targeted coursework, and competitive scholarships without charging students a dime. Instead, the company monetizes through enterprise toolkits licensed directly to school districts, charter networks, and private educational advisors seeking scaled advisory systems.

The software maps nearly 100,000 higher education, technical certification, and vocational training options across roughly 5,000 post-secondary institutions and 1,000 distinct professional career pathways. What began as a local South Carolina experiment now serves more than 840 active students across 24 states.

State Grant Funding and Expansion Milestones

Capital allocators took note of the startup's rapid market adoption earlier this year. The South Carolina Research Authority cleared a $25,000 non-dilutive development grant to accelerate Pathly's software engineering and institutional sales pipeline across regional school boards.

Brusky's calendar looks nothing like that of an ordinary high school senior. She holds a place in the 2026 Harvard Business School Foundry Program, a venture incubator targeting early-stage founders, and has delivered keynote remarks on educational restructuring and machine-learning applications at both SXSW and TEDx stages.

Yet she maintains a 4.6 GPA. Enrolled full-time at the Cyber Academy of South Carolina, she clears dual-enrollment college credits through Winthrop University while managing corporate operations. Beyond software, Brusky serves a second appointment as a Senior Statewide Ambassador for anti-litter agency PalmettoPride — winning selection over nearly 200 applicants — and holds formal commendations from both chambers of the South Carolina General Assembly for advisory work on statewide workforce readiness.

Brusky intends to steer her long-term academic studies toward environmental science while deploying Pathly's institutional software modules across additional public school districts ahead of the upcoming academic budget cycle.