Tagged: loneliness
11 results
The Problem of Love
The problem of love is the question at the center of Overtone, the new AI- and voice-forward dating service from Hinge founder Justin McLeod. After more than a decade building Hinge into a $400 million business, McLeod left the CEO seat and raised $18 million to reimagine how technology helps people find a partner. His premise is simple and stubborn: as loneliness climbs, few problems matter more, and the deeper he digs, the more interesting it becomes. Overtone gets to know each person in their own voice and makes only the introductions worth making.
Andromeda Robotics
Andromeda Robotics is a Melbourne-founded, San Francisco-based robotics company building Abi, a colourful humanoid companion robot designed to reduce loneliness in aged care and assisted living. Abi holds conversations in more than 90 languages, remembers residents across visits, and runs group activities, working alongside care teams rather than replacing them. Founded in 2022 by Grace Brown, the company deploys Abi to care homes on a subscription basis and raised a $23M Series A in September 2025 led by Forerunner.
Cobu
Cobu is a Boston-based proptech company that turns apartment residents into a real community - and turns that community into occupancy. Its resident-powered, AI-enabled platform runs building-wide chats, interest groups, in-person events, and always-on Google review and referral outreach, backed by a team of virtual community managers. For renters it fights isolation; for owners and operators it drives signed leases, higher renewals, better online reputation, and less busywork for on-site teams. Founded in 2018 as Doorbell, Cobu is used across dozens of U.S. states and by many of the country's largest multifamily operators.
Meeno
Meeno is an AI-powered relationship mentor founded by former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg. Built on large language models with input from clinicians and relationship experts, the app gives people private, non-judgmental, 24/7 guidance on friendships, family, work and romance. After finding that most of its users were young men, Meeno leaned into voice-based practice for dating and social confidence - positioning itself as a 'Duolingo for dating.' It is backed by Sequoia Capital, Andrew Ng's AI Fund and NEA.
Friend
Friend is a consumer AI startup making a $129 always-listening pendant that texts the wearer with commentary, jokes and emotional support. Founded by Harvard dropout Avi Schiffmann - the teenager behind the viral nCoV2019 COVID tracker - Friend bet $1.8 million on its one-word domain and then $1 million on a deliberately graffiti-bait subway campaign that turned New York City into an unfiltered focus group.
Anna Ford
Anna Ford is the co-founder and CEO of Bookclubs, the free app and website that has grown into the organizing layer for more than a million readers and over 100,000 book clubs worldwide. A former public health policy advocate with a Georgetown degree and a Harvard Kennedy School MPA, she built the platform out of pure frustration after the tangled email threads of her own Philadelphia book club nearly killed it. The fix - coded by a friend named Ian Campbell, who later became her husband - turned a logistics problem into a company, and a public health career into a mission against loneliness. She runs it all from Camden, Maine.
Benjamin Pleat
Benjamin (Ben) Pleat is the CEO and co-founder of Cobu, a Boston-based resident-engagement platform that turns apartment buildings into actual communities. After watching his extroverted mother feel isolated in a well-appointed Manhattan building - and learning that apartment owners bleed money to roughly 50% annual tenant churn - he built a company on a simple bet: a single friend in your building makes you 30%+ more likely to renew your lease. A Harvard economics grad who passed through WeWork's growth team and Goldman Sachs' real estate private equity group, Pleat now leads a company that has powered community in tens of thousands of apartment homes by getting neighbors into the same room for poker nights, potlucks, and chef dinners.
Renate Nyborg
Renate Nyborg is the founder and CEO of Meeno, a generative-AI app teaching people - mostly young men - how to build real relationships, which she frames as a fight against loneliness she rates 'on par with climate change.' She was the first woman to run Tinder and previously led Apple's App Store subscriptions in Europe and built Headspace's first international product and marketing org. Half Norwegian, half Dutch, raised across four countries and fluent in five languages, she studied philosophy at Cambridge in her third language. Meeno has raised about $5 million from Sequoia, Andrew Ng's AI Fund and NEA, and has pivoted from text advice toward voice-based practice scenarios it calls the 'Duolingo of dating.'
Circles
Circles is a New York-based digital mental health company that connects people facing similar life challenges - grief, divorce, infertility, caregiving, narcissistic relationships - into small, professionally facilitated peer support groups. Founded in 2020 by Irad Eichler and Dan Landa, its mobile and web platform pairs trained therapists with groups of strangers who share a struggle, betting that being heard by people who actually understand is its own form of medicine. The company has raised $24.5M and grown to more than 160,000 members.
Avi Schiffmann
Avi Schiffmann is a 23-year-old American technologist and founder who first went viral at 17 when his hand-built COVID-19 tracker hit 36 million daily users. He dropped out of Harvard after one semester, built Ukraine Take Shelter to house 100,000 refugees, then bet nearly his entire $2.5M seed round on a single domain - spending $1.88M on friend.com. His company Friend makes a $99 AI pendant that listens to your life and texts back like a companion, sparking a national debate about loneliness, surveillance, and what it means to connect.
Anne Helen Petersen
Anne Helen Petersen is an American journalist, culture critic, and author best known for her newsletter Culture Study and her book 'Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.' Holding a PhD in Media Studies from UT Austin, she went from academic celebrity-gossip historian to BuzzFeed News Senior Culture Writer before launching one of Substack's most-read newsletters. She writes about the structural forces — work culture, consumerism, loneliness, burnout — that shape everyday life, blending academic rigor with deeply personal, accessible prose. She now lives on Lummi Island, Washington, with her partner Charlie Warzel and their dogs.