What began as a way to simply calm his mind while building an app turned into a whole new app on its own.
Raj Goyal, CEO and founder of Ajivar, started the app after his former business partner suggested meditation to help him sleep through his stressful day-to-day.
"I was deep in coding and wasn't able to sleep, to focus well, when my other co-founder (for a previous app Goyal worked on) from the Valley said 'You need to do meditation and yoga,'" Goyal said. "That truly change the way I looked at things."
Enter Ajivar. It's a meditation app on a whole new level — unlike other apps such as mega-popular Calm, Ajivar uses an artificial intelligence engine to get to know the user on a personal level and teach mindfulness techniques so there's less time spent on the phone and more in the real world.
"We do not want to encourage the users to be on their phone all the time," co-founder and licensed therapist Trine Schmidt said. "We have a baseline of information we provide them, a guide as they go through while they explore the way they feel and any problems they may have. So it's a brief guide to interaction, like a life coach."
The skills they learn could be valuable to school and companies, Goyal said, which is why he is directly marketing to those institutions. His first customer is the University of Tampa, who is testing the app in small focus groups to help expand its AI.
"Clearly our target market is academic institutions and the corporate world," he said. "What organizations are looking for is EQ versus IQ. It's more important for the individual to have communication skills, connection skills and bring peers together. It's really far more important in personal success as well as corporate environment."
Gina Firth, University of Tampa's associate dean of wellness, agrees.
"I wanted to have some kind of tool to utilize that was literally in their back pocket," she said. "Our world was a pretty tough place to be in sometimes and one of the most important skills to teach our students is increasing our emotional intelligence and getting to utilize mindful techniques. It has such a gigantic impact on the person, not only on academics and retention, but becoming a more peaceful soul."
Ajivar is likely to launch more widely across UT's campus either this fall or spring 2020.
For the Ajivar team, they're hopeful the app will not replace therapy, but simply provide another tool for those in need to help.
"I think therapy is great for things to work on in terms of trauma and tougher things, but most of the stuff we therapists do is teaching people how to be resilient and cope," Schmidt said. "A lot can be taught by watching videos or talking. I wish I could travel and talk about mindfulness and do workshops, but one workshop won’t have huge impact on a lot of people. I think this is a great opportunity for people to be guided in a way they never have been before."
