Four students who got tired of
resume tools treating people like marks
Zelume is a resume builder and job-hunt workspace made by four students at Berkeley. We built it because we needed it, and because the tools we tried on the way made us angry.
What is Zelume?
Zelume is an AI resume builder and job application platform for students, graduates, and early-career people. It covers the whole hunt in one place: an ATS resume checker that shows what applicant tracking systems actually parse, resume tailoring against real job postings, cover letter generation, application tracking, interview prep, and fifteen recruiter-tested templates with free PDF and Word export. No watermark, no export paywall, no weekly-fee trick. There's also a shelf of free PDF and writing tools that need no account at all.
Where this came from
Junior year, internship season. Between the four of us we sent out a few hundred applications, which meant living inside resume builders for months. The pattern got familiar fast: you spend an hour making a resume, and the export button is where the trap springs. A watermark across your name. A “free” download that costs $2.95, billed weekly, forever, with the cancel button hidden behind a support ticket.
None of that has anything to do with helping someone get hired. So we built our own: first a scrappy checker that scored our resumes the way applicant tracking systems actually parse them, then a builder our friends started asking to use. That became Zelume.
The mission hasn't changed since: getting your first job is already hard enough. Resume software shouldn't make it harder.
The rules we build by
Free has to mean free
The free plan exports real PDFs and Word files with no watermark, no page limit, no card required. Paid plans are flat monthly prices, cancellation lives in your settings, and the Interview Pass expires on its own because nobody should have to remember to cancel.
Your resume should sound like you
Our AI does legwork: it tightens wording, finds the gaps between your resume and a posting, and flags claims that look invented rather than writing them for you. And there is no auto-apply here, on purpose. You read every application you send, and you press the button.
Build in the open
Zelume runs a public MCP server any AI agent can connect to, the engine behind it is headed for open source, and our comparison pages say plainly where competitors beat us. We also think resumes should be built from evidence, not exaggeration, which is why we're building tools that analyze public work, like GitHub repositories, and help people present what they've actually built. You can read how we think about all of this on the blog.
Who we are
Four students, one campus, a lot of shared Google Docs. We ship Zelume between problem sets, which keeps us honest about what matters: we only build features we would use in our own job hunts, and every one gets tested on our own resumes first.
Being small cuts both ways, so here is the honest version. You will not find “millions of users” numbers on this page, because we would rather show you none than invent some. What you get instead: when you write to support, a founder reads it, usually the same day, and your bug report genuinely changes what we build next week.
Want to talk to us? The support widget in the app reaches us directly, or email hello@zelume.io.
See what we built