Kinsome, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, reimagines intergenerational bonding for the digital era. Its kid-friendly, audio-first companion, Kinzey, chats with kids and learns about their interests, leveraging that knowledge to prompt thorough, thoughtful updates to share. Grandparents can listen and respond to these updates with one click, bringing them into the daily lives of their grandchildren.
We spent time with co-founders Eben Pingree and Mike Gerbush to talk about their innovative solution and the challenges of fostering real relationships across generations.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about Kinsome.
Eben: Kinsome is a platform focused on connecting grandparents and grandkids, particularly when they don’t see each other regularly. Parents are uniquely positioned to facilitate a relationship between their kids and their own parents, but that takes a deliberate effort. Even with the best of intentions, many parents are just too busy, and that effort falls by the wayside.
We want to remove parents as the bottleneck and bring these generations together. But you can’t just put an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old on a video call and expect them to have a beautiful connection right off the bat. We saw an opportunity with artificial intelligence (AI) to create a facilitation layer. Using AI, we make it fun for kids to share their lives with their grandparents and build a foundation for a stronger relationship.
What was the catalyst for founding Kinsome?
Eben: A year ago both my mom and my father-in-law were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and suddenly, my wife and I felt an incredible urgency to make sure our kids developed as deep a bond as possible with both of them in this window of time that we now have. We looked around for technical solutions and were underwhelmed by the options that are out there. Video calls, for example: It’s incredibly difficult to coordinate a time when everyone is available and when three little kids are interested in talking. That was usually an unfulfilling experience for everyone.
My parents live nearby, and my kids have a beautiful relationship with them because they’re another set of adults giving them positive attention and constant engagement with their interests. I saw how beneficial and healthy that can be — including for my parents, because it keeps them on their toes. Having the ability to have this kind of relationship was a big inspiration.
Is Kinsome an app that kids and grandparents download?
Eben: On the kids’ side, it’s an app; parents set up the account and the kids are the primary users. On the grandparents’ side, it’s much more streamlined. They get a text or email with links to the child’s updates, and with one click they can hear their grandkid’s update. Then, the grandparent can respond to it. It’s an asynchronous experience that brings the generations together.
How does the AI component work?
Mike: A lot of companies use AI to directly combat loneliness in older adults. But we believe strongly in building the human connection between grandparents and grandkids, so we use AI as a facilitator. It guides the users with icebreakers, inspiration and activities to ease them into a natural conversation.
The core of the app encourages grandkids to give regular updates about what they did that day. The AI coaxes out the details of that update, summarizes them, transcribes them and delivers them to the grandparent in a way that is easy for them to digest. It also gives the grandparent ideas for ways they can respond to their grandchild.
So it’s much more than asking, “How was school today?” and getting a quick “Good” as the reply.
Eben: Definitely. We bring it all to life in the form of a robot named Kinzey. Any time a child opens the app, Kinzey is there to engage them. During every session, she’s learning about their interests, who their friends are, what their schedule is like — so she can then ask the specific prompting questions that get kids beyond those one-word answers that parents are all too familiar with.
What are some of the challenges you’ve had to navigate?
Mike: We’re on the forefront of AI, which is evolving very quickly; it’s a completely different ballgame even from when we started development nine months ago. Because the landscape is changing so quickly, getting that aspect right is interesting.
Another thing we’re navigating is finding ways to keep kids engaged. We didn’t want to just build a game — we’re trying to make this quality screen time where they really connect with their grandparents. Getting all that to line up in the right way is a big challenge.
Eben: We also have three different personas to satisfy: grandparents, parents and kids. Each of those groups present very different challenges, and there’s infinite variety within each group. Plus, privacy and safety have to be paramount in everything we do.
What’s next on the horizon?
Eben: We recently finished raising an initial round of funding — over $1 million from angel investors. We were deliberate about finding angel investors, because we felt like that would allow us to keep the mission at the forefront of our work. Now have the ability to start expanding the team, especially on the engineering and product design front.
We’re also working on getting more early users on the platform, people who believe in our vision and who want to come in and help us refine this. If anyone is interested in joining, they can sign up for our wait list.
You can find out more about Kinsome at their website.
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