Meeno.

Renate Nyborg was the first woman to run Tinder as CEO, a job that puts you in charge of the largest matchmaking machine ever built. The interesting thing about running that machine is what it teaches you: matching two people is easy, and it is also not the point. You can hand someone a phone number and a mutual "like" and still leave them completely unequipped for the thirty seconds after "hey." The match is the setup. The connection is the skill. And nobody was selling the skill.

So in 2023 Nyborg left, and out of a company originally called Amorai came Meeno - a New York startup with roughly twelve people and an unusually large ambition, which is to teach one billion people how to be good at their relationships. Not a dating app. Not, emphatically, a virtual girlfriend. Meeno is an AI mentor, built on top of public large language models with clinicians and relationship experts in the room, that gives you private, non-judgmental, around-the-clock advice on the messy human stuff: the breakup, the first date, the friend you have been meaning to text for a year, the coworker you cannot read.

The framing Nyborg keeps returning to is bracing. "Loneliness is the most important battle we'll fight in our lifetime," she has said, "on par with climate change." That is a big claim, but it is not a lonely one - the U.S. Surgeon General has called loneliness an urgent public health issue, with the highest rates among young adults, which happens to be exactly who Meeno was built for.

What makes Meeno genuinely different from the crowded field of AI companions is the direction it points you. Replika and Blush build something for you to talk to instead of a human. Meeno builds something to talk to before you go talk to a human. It understands your history and the web of your relationships, then nudges you back out into the world. This is a real product decision with real teeth, and it is also, conveniently, the reason Andrew Ng invested: he has said he is worried about AI that simulates friendship, and excited about AI that meets a genuine need. Meeno is on the second list.

Then the data did what data does, which is refuse to cooperate with your original plan. Meeno set out to mentor all your relationships. It grew to about 100,000 users, and more than half of them turned out to be men - young men, often anxious, mostly stuck on the specific and unglamorous problem of talking to someone they are attracted to. A lot of founders would have argued with that. Nyborg followed it.

By 2025 Meeno had leaned in, building voice-based AI characters you can practice on - being prompted, say, to strike up a conversation with a woman while waiting in line at a pizza place. Nyborg calls it "Duolingo for dating," and the analogy is sharper than it sounds. You do not get fluent in a language by reading about it; you get fluent by reps. Meeno turns the terrifying, unrehearsable moment into something you can rehearse. "Male loneliness is a problem that's been getting worse for 30 years," she has said. "I never thought we could snap our fingers and fix it." The reps are the fix.