Kyndred, a Romanian startup developing AI companions designed to support users with everyday tasks, has raised €500,000 in a pre-seed round from Early Game Ventures.
Founded by serial entrepreneurs Alex Bararu and Rares Mosescu, Kyndred is developing AI characters designed to provide users with a consistent way of interacting with artificial intelligence, rather than requiring them to engage separately with different AI agents and bots across multiple applications.
The company’s approach centres on AI companions with a face, voice and memory that can interact with users in real time and retain information from previous conversations. Kyndred says the aim is to build companions that learn users’ habits and preferences over time and can eventually assist them with everyday activities.
Most AI characters today are really just text in a chat window. We build characters with a face, a voice and a memory, who respond to you in real time and remember what you told them. Company, not conversation.
Our ambition is for your character to help you become a better version of yourself: to encourage you to get out of the house, see people and get organized,
said Alex Bararu, co-founder and CMO of Kyndred.
Kyndred generated its first revenue through a pre-launch campaign after animations of the product attracted interest from the founders’ existing community. Its first AI companion, Maya, has more than 150 paying customers three months after launch.
Early Game Ventures said the company’s focus on building ongoing relationships between users and AI, rather than task-based interactions, was a factor in its decision to invest.
The reason we believe AI companions are superior to AI assistants has nothing to do with their technical capabilities. Assistants are built on transactions: you open one, extract the information you need, and close it. Companions are built on relationships: you come back to them, and you do so without necessarily having a specific task to complete,
said Dan Calugareanu, Partner at Early Game Ventures.
Kyndred will use the pre-seed funding to improve Maya, develop additional AI companions, grow its customer base and expand its team. The company is currently hiring an AI Engineer and a Product Engineer.
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