Early Game Ventures extends EUR 500,000 to Romanian AI startup Kyndred

Founded by two serial entrepreneurs, Alex Băraru and Rareș Moșescu, 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.

According to Dan Călugăreanu, Partner at Early Game Ventures, companies created by Kyndred are much more than interfaces. Instead, he says, they are super-apps.

“These super-apps won’t build a conversation, but an environment in which the user feels completely at home. They won’t 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,” he said.

The company official added that AI companions are superior to AI assistants.

“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,” Călugăreanu added.

According to Alex Băraru, Co-founder and CMO, Kyndred builds “characters with a face, a voice and a memory, who respond to you in real time and remember what you told them.”

The idea for Kyndred’s first AI character came from the need for an AI tutor for Meditații.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.

“We built Meditații.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,” he added.

Before the product was even finished, from the very first animations, hundreds of users from the founders’ 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.

Kyndred’s flagship AI companion, Maya, already has more than 150 paying customers just three months after launch.

The EUR 500,000 pre-seed round will go entirely toward accelerating product development (improving Maya's features and developing new companions), growing the customer base, and building the team. Kyndred is currently hiring an AI Engineer and a Product Engineer.