What the business is
AI chatbot app giving relationship advice and mentoring, aimed at Gen Z users
The bet
A chatbot positioned as a personal mentor, not a companion, therapist or coach, can reduce Gen Z loneliness and improve relationships
Starting capital
$3.9M seed led by Sequoia (AI Fund and NEA participating) after an April pre-seed; $5M total
How it started
Former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg left Tinder in August 2022. She said she had become aware of loneliness among young users, especially Gen Z, at Tinder, and Andrew Ng pointed her to large language models as a potential technological answer.
What happened
The company, formerly Amorai, raised a pre-seed in April 2023 with angels including Megan Jones Bell, Jim Lanzone and Joe Zadeh. Meeno avoids comparison with Replika and Blush by calling itself a personal mentor and says it will not be a virtual girlfriend, boyfriend, clinical therapist or coach. During setup it asks for age, ethnicity and sexual orientation so the bot can avoid biased conversations. It plans an iOS launch in December in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands.
What has to be true
Nyborg saw loneliness among Gen Z users during her time at Tinder
LLMs offered a way to provide mentoring through a chatbot
A mentor positioning avoids the companion, therapist and coach categories
iOS-first launch suits teens' device choice and Apple's privacy tools
What can be applied
By serving Gen Z, Meeno will face the same guardrail problems that Snap's My AI chatbot ran into, TechCrunch noted.
Aftermath
As of 2023-09-27 Meeno had $5M raised in total and a December iOS launch planned, with no users reported. TechCrunch noted it had not detailed its AI's handling of some topics.
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