Romanian startup Kyndred secures €500K from Early Game Ventures to develop AI companions

Kyndred is a Romanian startup developing AI companions to help users with everyday tasks, has raised €500,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Early Game Ventures.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Alex Bararu and Rares Mosescu, Kyndred is building AI characters that offer users a more consistent way to interact with artificial intelligence. Instead of switching between different AI agents and bots across multiple apps, users can interact with a single AI companion.

The company’s platform focuses on AI companions that have a face, voice and memory, allowing them to communicate with users in real time and remember details from earlier conversations. Kyndred aims to create companions that can learn users’ habits and preferences over time and gradually help with a wider range of 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 product animations gained strong interest from the founders’ existing community. Three months after launch, its first AI companion, Maya, has attracted more than 150 paying customers.

Early Game Ventures said Kyndred’s focus on creating long-term relationships between users and AI, rather than simply helping with individual tasks, was one of the reasons it chose to invest in the company.

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 plans to use the pre-seed funding to further develop Maya, create additional AI companions, expand its customer base and strengthen its team. The company is currently looking to hire an AI Engineer and a Product Engineer.