Jenny Shao was a practicing physician completing her residency at Harvard. During the pandemic, she observed that people in isolation were experiencing neurological impacts and needed support. This realization drove her to leave her medical career and her Harvard residency to launch a startup offering an AI assistant called Robyn.
Robyn is designed to be an empathic and emotionally intelligent AI for people. Navigating human relationships with AI assistants is a tricky space. On one hand, there are general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT. On the other hand, there are companion and friendship apps like Character.AI and Replika, and even therapy apps. A study in July indicated that 72 percent of U.S. teens have used AI companion apps. These apps have been accused of playing a part in the suicides of multiple people through various lawsuits.
Shao said that Robyn is positioned to be neither a friendship app nor a replacement for a therapist or a clinical practitioner. As a physician, she has seen things go badly when tech companies try to replace your doctor. She stated that Robyn is not and will never be a clinical replacement. It is equivalent to someone who knows you very well, and its role is to support you. You can think of Robyn as your emotionally intelligent partner.
The founder explained that with Robyn, her startup has tried to replicate the way humans remember things. Shao previously worked under Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel’s lab, which won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to research human memory. She said she put those learnings into Robyn to help the AI understand users more.
Robyn is available on iOS and has an onboarding process similar to many journaling or mental health apps. The app asks you about yourself, your goals, how you react when challenged, and what kind of tone you want Robyn to respond in. Once you complete the onboarding, you can chat with Robyn about different topics. For instance, when asked to build a morning routine, it asked a bunch of questions and had a detailed conversation about having minimum screen time at the beginning of the day.
As you chat more with Robyn, the app provides more insights into your patterns and describes different traits about you. These include your emotional fingerprint, attachment style, love language, growth edge, and inner critic. The startup has also made a demo website to analyze profiles and give insights into what kinds of insights users would get out of Robyn.
Shao said the company takes safety seriously and has been putting in guardrails even during early testing. The app gives users a crisis line number and directs them to the nearest emergency room if they talk about self-harm. The assistant also pushes back on certain topics and answers. If you ask it to show the latest sports score or count to one thousand, Robyn will say it cannot perform these actions but can help you with personal matters.
The company has raised five and a half million dollars in seed funding led by M13. Participation came from Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, early Canva investor Bill Tai, former Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman, and X.ai co-founder Christian Szegedy. The startup had three team members at the start of the year and has now grown to ten people.
Rasmussen said the app’s emotional memory system was impressive, and Shao’s mission of helping people attracted him to invest. He stated that we are living through a massive disconnection problem where people are surrounded by technology but feel less understood than ever. He believes Robyn tackles that head-on by solving emotional disconnection, helping people reflect, recognize their own patterns, and reconnect with who they are. It is not about therapy or replacing relationships, but about strengthening someone’s capacity to connect with themselves first, and then with others.
A big challenge for Robyn will be to maintain user safety and ensure users do not anthropomorphize the chatbot. Latif Parecha, a partner at M13, said that Robyn’s ultimate goal is to foster human connections, but for AIs operating in this realm, there need to be guardrails. He emphasized that there must be guardrails for escalation in situations where people are in real danger, especially as AI becomes a part of our lives just like family and friends are.
The startup has been testing Robyn with a select set of users for a few months and is launching today in the U.S. The app is paid, and a subscription costs nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents per month or one hundred ninety-nine dollars per year.