• Czech AI-powered mental health assistant Elin.ai attracts additional EUR 420K of Pre-Seed investment
• The startup’s LLMs evaluate a user’s online activity and provide practical advice, specifically aimed at Gen Z
• With the new funding, Elin.ai will accelerate product development, expand psychology teams, and pursue international growth

This December, the Prague-based digital health startup Elin.ai announced the extension of its Pre-Seed round of investment. In addition to the EUR 600K that the startup received from Presto Ventures, BD Partners and angel investors this June, JSK Investments chips in with EUR 420K, as the overall amount of the round reaches EUR 1M.

Elin.ai in a Nutshell

Elin.ai, founded in 2023 by Dr Jan Romportl (CEO), Dr Petr Stanislav (CTO), and Dr Jiří Horáček, addresses the growing mental health crisis, particularly among Gen Z. With expertise spanning AI, cybernetics, psychiatry, and neurology, the founders identified rising anxiety, polarization, and mistrust fueled by online content.

The Elin.ai mobile app acts as a ‘cognitive antivirus,’ analyzing users’ online interactions and content consumption. Using AI and proprietary LLMs, it offers personalized psychological advice via chat, helping users understand and cope with harmful content. The app aims to support mental well-being through context, guidance, and actionable interventions.

According to Dr Romportl, Elin’s LLM quickly adapts with daily five-minute interactions, learning even faster if users connect social media accounts like Instagram, Discord, or Twitter. Importantly, user data remains private, forming a dedicated long-term memory unique to each individual, and can be deleted anytime.

Gradual Growth with Gradual Funding

The CEO shares that it was planned from the beginning to do the Pre-Seed round step by step. The team wanted to raise a part, then work on the product, check the product-market fit, get the feedback from users, test marketing, and then show the next investor something more real and tangible.

Dr Romportl admits that Elin.ai started with just an idea, without even so much as a presentation, let alone any prototype. This got them their first investment led by Presto Ventures.

Přemysl Rubeš, founder and managing partner of Presto Ventures, highlights three key reasons why investing in Elin.ai is indeed a unique decision for the fund:

• It’s a B2C user app, a category Presto Ventures typically avoids.
• Dr Jan Romportl, a respected AI and deeptech expert, has a long-standing relationship with Presto Ventures, instilling confidence in the investment.
• Out of Presto Ventures’ 60 portfolio companies, Elin.ai is the only startup to receive funding at the idea stage.

‘The investment in Elin.ai stems from our commitment to leveraging technology for meaningful societal impact. We have worked with the team before and believe in their technology-driven approach that addresses the crucial need for mental health support among young social media users,’ BD Partners’ general partner Ladislav Bartonicek adds.

Progress Demonstrated

The initial investment allowed Elin’ai to go through some experiments, prototypes (both successful and failed), and eventually a web app with a few hundreds of testing users.

‘The single most important thing was that we finally launched the native mobile MVP app to the app stores – both Apple and Google – and since then we’re seeing a very nice flow of incoming users. This allows us to start building the best AI models for painful topics based on anonymized real-world data. It’s still the typical startupish ‘MVP that we’re ashamed of,’ but it’s up and running and used by real people who give great feedback, and this is what allows us to get to the real product-market fit. Then also a lot of things were improved on the backend and under the hood, but still many of them have not made it through the backlog to the frontend that the users see. We have a prosaic bottleneck in frontend development,’ Dr Romportl reports.

It was mentioned earlier that it would be possible to connect Elin.ai to social media starting this Autumn, beginning with Instagram, and adding Discord and Twitter later on. The progress is somewhat late because of the mentioned frontend bottleneck. The Instagram prototype is on the backend, and the frontend is scheduled for Q1 2025. The Discord bot and integration is under development, and a prototype of the Elin plugin for Chrome is in the internal testing.

Nevertheless, Elin.ai has to present an aesthetically pleasing minimalistic app on the app store, with the first thousand of real users who came just a few days into the launch. The app is available in four languages: Czech, Slovak, English, and Ukrainian. This was convincing enough to secure the funding from JSK Investments.

The New Funding and Plans

The fund’s founder and managing partner Simona Kijonkova explains why she sees Elin.ai as a vital project:

‘The mental health of young people is in a state of crisis. Studies show that up to 40 percent of European teenagers suffer from depression or anxiety linked to the impact of social media, with devastating effects on their psychological wellbeing and development. At the same time, access to therapeutic and psychiatric care is severely limited in many countries, including the Czech Republic. Alarmingly, for the first time in history, the suicide rates are higher among young people than among middle-aged adults, underscoring the urgent need to address this issue. By leveraging artificial intelligence, the platform offers an accessible solution, providing not only immediate and personalized support but also prevention and long-term care – areas we cannot overlook.’

Elin.ai will use the additional funding to remove the mentioned bottleneck on the frontend development and speed up implementation and deployment of all the features. The startup will also attract more expert psychology teams working on training data annotations (e.g. eating disorders, crisis intervention, etc). International growth is another priority in view of the new funding.

Leveraging AI to improve Gen Z’s mental health is crucial as social media exposure contributes significantly to rising anxiety, depression, and emotional distress among young people. Solutions like Elin.ai’s can provide personalized, real-time psychological support and guidance. By offering context, interventions, and actionable advice, AI can help users navigate harmful digital environments, fostering healthier habits and emotional resilience.