The former doctor created Robyn, an empathetic AI companion

Jenny Shao was a practicing physician and resident at Harvard. During the pandemic, Shao saw that people in isolation were having an impact on their neurological condition and therefore needed support. This led her to leave her medical career and residency at Harvard to start working with an AI assistant named Robyn.

Robyn is intended to be an empathetic, emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence for humans.

Navigating human relationships with AI assistants is a tricky space. On the one hand, there are general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT; on the other hand, there are companionship/friendship/avatar apps like Character.AI, Replika, and Friend, and even therapy apps like Feeling Great. A study conducted in July found that 72% of U.S. teens have used AI companion apps. These apps have been accused of being involved in the suicides of many people in various lawsuits.

Shao stated that she tries to position Robyn in a way that she is not a friendship app or a replacement for a therapist or doctor.

“As a doctor, I've seen how bad things get when tech companies try to replace your doctor. Robyn is and will never be a clinical employee (replacement). It's the equivalent of someone who knows you very well. Typically, their role is to support you. You can think of Robyn as your emotionally intelligent partner,” Shao said.

The founder said that in Robyn's case, her startup was trying to recreate the way people remember things. Shao previously worked in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to study human memory. Shao said she passed this knowledge on to Robyn so that the AI ​​could better understand users.

Robyn, available on iOS, has an onboarding process like many other journaling or mental health apps. The app asks you about yourself, your goals, how you react when you are faced with a challenge, and what tone Robyn uses when responding.

Once your onboarding is complete, you can chat with Robyn about a variety of topics. For example, when I asked him to create a morning routine, he asked me several questions and also had a detailed conversation about minimal screen time at the beginning of the day.

As you talk to Robyn more often, the app will give you more insight into your pattern and describe your various characteristics, including your emotional fingerprint, attachment style, love language, growth advantage, and inner critic. The startup also made it demo site for profile analysis in X and give insight into what kind of insights they could gain from Robyn.

Shao said the company takes safety seriously and installs guardrails even when she tested the chatbot as a solo user. The app gives users a crisis line number and directs them to the nearest emergency department if they are talking about self-harm. The assistant also moves certain topics and replies. If you ask him to show you the latest sports score or count to 1000, Robyn will say he can't do those things, but he will help you with personal matters.

The company raised $5.5 million in seed funding led by M13 with participation from Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, early Canva investor Bill Tai, former Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman and X.ai co-founder Christian Szegedy. At the beginning of the year, the startup had three team members, and has now grown to 10 people.

Rasmussen said the app's emotional memory system is impressive and Shao's mission to help people led him to invest in the app.

“We live with a huge problem of disconnection. People are surrounded by technology, but they feel less understood than ever. Robyn tackles this problem head-on. She addresses emotional disconnection, helps people reflect, recognize their own patterns, and reconnect with who they are. This isn't about therapy or replacing relationships. It's about strengthening someone's ability to connect – first with themselves, then with others,” he told TechCrunch via email.

A big challenge for Robyn would be maintaining user safety, as well as ensuring that users don't anthropomorphize the chatbot.

Latif Parecha, partner at M13, said Robyn's ultimate goal is to foster human connections, but AI working in this field needs guardrails.

“There needs to be guardrails in place to prevent escalation in situations where people are in real danger. Especially since AI will be a part of our lives, just like family and friends,” Parecha told TechCrunch.

The startup tested Robyn on a selected group of users for several months, and today it launched in the US. The app is paid and a subscription costs $19.99 per month or $199 per year.