Friend: The pre-seed AI startup that just spent $1.8m to buy the friend.com domain

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This pre-seed AI startup just spent $1.8m to buy the friend.com domain

• This will either be one of the craziest marketing plays in tech history or a huge flop

• The founder is a 21 year-old Harvard dropout prodigy

So what’s the startup and who’s the founder behind it? Here’s the story of Friend and Avi Schiffmann 📈

💭 Did you know that 61% of young people suffer from serious loneliness in the United States?

Loneliness.

This is the problem Avi Schiffmann is trying to solve with Friend - an AI wearable companion that’s there for your emotional needs.

Everyone’s been trying to build an “AI assistant” for productivity where it could do things like book you flights or send out emails. 

Avi, however thinks that companionship is a far more interesting use case that incumbents like OpenAI won’t work on. 👫

Talking to AI about things going on in your life is the biggest winner in AI so far with startups like Replika and Character AI getting a ton of traction.

They say “you’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”, so having an intelligent friend always by your side should make you an overall better person. 

Avi thinks that at least 10% of America aged 18-27 will consider AI a friend by the end of this decade…

Backstory 👀

Before Friend, Avi had been a bit of a teen tech prodigy.🤓

At age 17, he created a COVID tracking website that gained millions of users and became a crucial resource during the pandemic.