Mindful conversation app Asya.ai marks Change Ventures first consumer investment
The mindfulness, meditation and biohacking industries have grown into massive global markets. Driven in part by a millennial generation with a different approach to living their lives and leveraging technology for the self-improvement. With Calm.com recently entering the unicorn ranking, the industry shows clear proof of scale.
When we met Evalds and Ariels, co-founders of Asya.ai, it was immediately clear they have tapped into a strong trend. Asya’s focus is on improving conversations and interpersonal communications, where the smartphone and social media revolutions have reduced human attention spans by 30% during the last 15 years. Not to mention the rise of chat apps that have given birth to a new generation that engages in much less synchronous voice communication.
Asya’s contribution to fixing this problem is a mobile app that monitors the pace, brevity and pauses of your conversation in real-time to determine whether you are, for example, dominating a conversation to the detriment of your counterpart. Behind the app is a series of sophisticated AI models that analyze the audio content to clean the data and build the analytics.
One immediate concern that the Asya team was able to alleviate was privacy -the obvious challenge for such an app monitoring conversations. By parsing the audio file in the app and only sending a reduced set of recorded audio data to the back-end, Asya ensures that the content of a conversation is kept obfuscated and private. Their approach to deploying the technology puts them into the new category of ethical AI companies that ensure privacy and ethics are the cornerstone of their business from day one.
Asya is still in the early days and is working to validate their idea with consumers, a process which we are helping to fund by leading the 120,000 euro pre-seed round together with BuildIT, the leading hardware accelerator in the region. Access to the beta test app is currently limited, so hurry up and sign up on asya.ai to reserve your place in line!
About Change Ventures:
Change Ventures is the first pre-seed/seed venture capital fund with boots on the ground in all three Baltic states. We back ambitious founders based in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania as well as Baltic diaspora entrepreneurs building their businesses elsewhere in the world. Our initial investments range from €100k to €750k, with follow-on capital available for later rounds. Our founder-friendly no-nonsense investment process is designed to help founders with big, bold ambitions get fast investment decisions. Once we are on board, we help with getting to product-market fit, raising additional funds and growing the business, leveraging an unparalleled network of follow-on investors and partners.
Find us at www.changeventures.com or email us at info@changeventures.com.
