Robyn, an empathetic AI companion, is released by a former doctor

Jenny Shaw was a practicing physician and resident at Harvard University. During the pandemic, Shaw saw that isolated people had a neurological effect and needed support. This led her to leave her medical career and take up residency at Harvard to start an AI assistant called Robin.

Robin aims to be an AI that is empathetic and emotionally intelligent with people.

Navigating human relationships with AI assistants is a difficult space. On the one hand, there are general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT; On the other hand, there are companionship/friendship/avatar apps like Character.AI, Replika, Friend, and even therapy apps like Great feeling. A study in July indicated as much 72% of US teens have used companion AI apps. These apps have been accused of playing a role in the suicide of many people during diverse Lawsuits.

Shao said he tries to position Robyn in a way that makes it neither a friendship app nor a replacement for a therapist or clinical practitioner.

“As a doctor, I’ve seen things go wrong when tech companies try to replace your doctor,” Shaw said. “Robin is a clinical ‘substitute’ and never will be. He’s the equivalent of someone who knows you well. Usually their role is to support you. You can think of Robin as an emotionally intelligent partner.”

With Robyn, her startup tried to replicate the way humans remember things, the founder said. Shaw previously worked under the laboratory of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for human memory research. Shaw said she put these lessons into Robin to make the AI ​​understand users more.

Robyn, 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 faced with a challenge, and what kind of tone Robyn would respond with.

Once you’re done with the setup process, you can chat with Robyn about different topics. For example, when I asked him to create a morning routine for me, he asked me a bunch of questions and also had a detailed conversation about minimal screen time at the beginning of the day.

As you chat more with Robyn, the app will give you more insights into your style and also describe different traits about you, including your emotional signature, attachment style, love language, growth trait, and inner critic. The startup has also achieved Demo site for analyzing profiles on X And giving insights into the types of ideas they would get out of Robin.

Shaw said the company takes safety seriously, and put up guardrails even when it was testing the chatbot as a solo user. 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 undoes certain topics and answers. If you ask it to view the latest sports scores or ask it to count to 1,000, Robyn will say it can’t perform those actions but helps you with any personal matters.

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

Rasmussen said the app’s emotional memory system was impressive, and that Shaw’s mission of helping people attracted him to invest in the app.

“We’re living in a massive disconnect problem. People are surrounded by technology but feel less understood than ever before. Robyn addresses this problem head-on. He solves emotional disconnection, helps people reflect, recognize their own patterns, and reconnect with who they are. It’s not about therapy or replacing relationships. It’s about enhancing someone’s ability to connect — first with themselves, then with others,” he told TechCrunch via email.

The big challenge for Robyn is to keep its users safe and also ensure that users are not impersonating a chatbot.

Rubin’s ultimate goal is to strengthen human connections, but for AI systems working in this space, there need to be guardrails, said Latif Barisha, partner at M13.

“There have to be guardrails in place to escalate in situations where people are in real danger. Especially since AI is going to be a part of our lives just like family and friends,” Barisha told TechCrunch over a phone call.

The startup has been testing Robyn with a select group of users for a few months and launched today in the US. The app is paid, and the subscription costs $19.99 per month or $199 per year.