Jenny Shao was a practicing physician and was in residency at Harvard. During the pandemic, Shao saw that people in isolation had a neurological impact, and they needed support. This drove her to leave her medical career, the Harvard residency, to launch a start offering an AI assistant called Robyn.
Robyn is intended to be an empathic, emotionally intelligent AI for people.
Navigating human relationships with AI assistants is a tricky space. On the one hand, there are general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT; on the other, there are companion/friendship/avatar apps like Character.AI, Replika, and Friend, and even therapy apps like Feeling Great. A study in July indicated that 72% 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 it is trying to position Robyn in a way that it is neither a friendship app nor a replacement for a therapist or a clinical practitioner.
“As a physician, I have seen things go badly when tech companies try to replace your doctor. Robyn is and won’t ever be a clinical [replacement]. It is equivalent to someone who knows you very well. Usually, their role is to support you. You can think of Robyn as your emotionally intelligent partner,” Shao said.
The founder said that with Robyn, her startup has tried to replicate the way humans remember things. Shao previously worked under Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel’s, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, lab to research human memory. Shao said she put those learnings into Robyn to have the AI understand users more.
Robyn, which is available on iOS, has an onboarding process like many journaling or mental health apps. The app asks you about yourself, your goals, how you react when you are challenged, and what kind of tone you Robyn to respond in.
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Once you complete the onboarding, you can chat with Robyn about different topics. For instance, when I asked it to build a morning routine for me, it asked me a bunch of questions and also had a detailed conversation about having a minimum screen time at the beginning of the day.
As you chat more with Robyn, the app will give you more insights into your pattern and also describe different traits about you, including your emotional fingerprint, attachment style, love language, growth edge, and inner critic. The startup has also made a demo website to analyze profiles on X and give insights as to what kinds of insights they would get out of Robyn.
Shao said that the company takes safety seriously and has been putting in guardrails even when she was testing the chatbot as a solo user. The app gives users a crisis line number and points them to the nearest ER 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 ask it to count to 1,000, Robyn will say that it can’t perform these actions but help you with any personal stuff.
The company has raised $5.5 million in seed funding led by M13 with participation from Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, early Canva investor Bill Tai, ex-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 10 people.
Rasmussen said that the app’s emotional memory system was impressive, and Shao’s mission of helping people attracted him to invest in the app.
“We’re living through a massive disconnection problem. People are surrounded by technology but feel less understood than ever. Robyn tackles that head-on. It’s solving emotional disconnection, helping people reflect, recognize their own patterns, and reconnect with who they are. It’s not about therapy or replacing l relationships. It’s about strengthening someone’s capacity to connect — with themselves first, and then with others,” he told TechCrunch over email.
A big challenge for Robyn would be to maintain the safety of its users and also make sure users don’t 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 needs to be guardrails.
“There needs to be guardrails in place for escalation for situations where people are in real danger. Especially, as AI will be part of our lives just like are family and friends are,” Parecha told TechCrunch over a call.
The startup has been testing Robyn with a select set of users for a few months and launching today in the U.S. The app is paid, and the subscription costs $19.99 a month or $199 a year.
