About a year ago, Eben Pingree’s mom and father-in-law were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Beyond the sadness he and his wife felt at the official diagnosis, they were also overcome by a sense of urgency to make sure their kids were able to quickly develop a strong bond with their grandparents.
Pingree, who was chief product officer at EverTrue, lives in a Boston apartment below his parents and above his younger brother. He knows this multigenerational living situation isn’t possible for everyone, so he wanted to find a way to connect older and younger generations through technology.
He teamed up with his Williams College classmate Mike Gerbush, as well as local marketing and growth expert Ashley Hocking, to build Kinsome. The Boston startup’s app that connects grandparents and grandkids recently launched in the app store as a free-to-use public beta.
Hocking said the “sandwich generation” — those with young kids and aging parents — can download the app and add their kids and grandparents as users in their account.
Kids can then start sending updates to their grandparents through the app. The goal is to take some of the pressure off the parents — they don’t want parents putting an iPad in front of their kids and wasting 30 minutes trying to get them to say something.
Kinsome uses Kinzey, an AI chatbot, to prompt kids into talking about their activities at school, sports or their friends.
“How we’ve built (Kinzey) is really to be able to pull out more details about their day or about their interests and really go deep on what they want to talk about,” Hocking said.
Kids talk to Kinzey for a few minutes and then send their updates to their grandparents. Hocking said their grandparents can then listen to or read the voice memo and send a recording back.
Pingree said Kinzey learns from each conversation and the team aims to give her better memory and the ability to have more personalized conversations with kids.
“We want to toe that line. We don’t want Kinzey to be the solution. We don’t want her to steal the show. The goal is to facilitate connection with real people. But to do that, we know that it needs to be something that kids look forward to doing,” Pingree said.
Hocking said Kinsome has done extensive testing with the 55-plus community, including through the AARP AgeTech Collaborative, to ensure its app has a very simple user interface.
Pingree said Kinsome has raised roughly $750,000 from investors like Lars Albright, general partner at Unusual Ventures; Mike Massaro, CEO of Flywire; and Brent Grinna, founder and CEO of EverTrue. The company is targeting a raise of $1 million.
For now, Kinsome’s app is free. Hocking said after they gather feedback from the beta, the app will likely transition to a freemium model where communicating with more than one grandparent costs a monthly subscription fee.
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