Founded by two serial entrepreneurs, Alex B\u0103raru and Rare\u0219 Mo\u0219escu, who have already built a business with a gross merchandise value (GMV) of over EUR 15 million, Kyndred builds companions that assist users day to day, learns their habits, and helps them navigate an increasingly crowded AI landscape.<\/p>\n
According to Dan C\u0103lug\u0103reanu, Partner at Early Game Ventures, companies created by Kyndred are much more than interfaces. Instead, he says, they are super-apps.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese super-apps won\u2019t build a conversation, but an environment in which the user feels completely at home. They won\u2019t be a chatbot. Nor an assistant you summon and dismiss once it has helped you with what you needed. Rather, they will be a specific person, with a face, a voice, and the ability to remember what you said last week, who knows your favorite food, your hobbies, how you like to spend your time, when your loan payment or car insurance is due, and much more, and who assists you with your everyday tasks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The company official added that AI companions are superior to AI assistants.<\/p>\n
\u201cAssistants 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,\u201d C\u0103lug\u0103reanu added.<\/p>\n
According to Alex B\u0103raru, Co-founder and CMO, Kyndred builds \u201ccharacters with a face, a voice and a memory, who respond to you in real time and remember what you told them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea for Kyndred\u2019s first AI character came from the need for an AI tutor for Medita\u021bii.ro, the business the two founders have built over the past few years. Since no such assistant existed on the market, the founders built it themselves in just six months.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe built Medita\u021bii.ro without investors; with Kyndred, we found in EGV a partner who sees the same future we do. The investment goes into the product, the infrastructure and our first key hires,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Before the product was even finished, from the very first animations, hundreds of users from the founders\u2019 community expressed interest in buying it. Kyndred thus got off the ground in an unusual way: it earned its first revenue by selling an AI in a pre-launch campaign, after its animations went viral.<\/p>\n