Ex-Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg is back with a new app that helps you have hard conversations

Renate Nyborg has been trying to solve relationship problems since she was three years old.

Growing up across Norway and the Netherlands, her father would speak to Nyborg and her brother in his native Norwegian, while her mother would speak to the children in Dutch. The language immersion was great for the children, but Nyborg recalls that, at times, her life felt a bit like living in the Tower of Babel. 

“They were constantly getting into small arguments for misunderstanding each other, and I was apparently interrupting them constantly to try and say, ‘No, no, you’ve misunderstood her. This is what she really means,’” Nyborg, now 37, tells me. Straddling different cultures and often moving around, Nyborg became obsessed with communication and relationship science. It’s an interest that’s only intensified in recent years.

When she was in her teens, she started playing around with mobile technology. The two areas—connection and personal tech—have consistently played a role in her career. After working at Apple and Headspace, Nyborg spent about two years at Tinder, first as general manager of Europe, Middle East, and Africa and then as CEO. Nyborg left Tinder in August 2022 shortly after Match Group CEO Bernard Kim took over and implemented a number of management changes.

All of this has culminated into Nyborg’s latest venture: Meeno, an artificial intelligence-powered relationship mentoring app that’s operating in closed beta and available for pre-order in the Apple App Store. Expected to launch in the coming months, it essentially serves as part friend, part coach—the company strictly refers to the chatbot as a “personal mentor.” 

The best way to describe it, Nyborg says, is by imagining Remy, the rat from the Disney film Ratatouille who sits atop a clumsy man’s head and orchestrates his movements (by tugging the man’s hair) to help him become a world-class chef. In Nyborg’s telling, Meeno is Remy, and the guidance isn’t around making a soup, but figuring out how to navigate tough interpersonal relationships.

Say you want to leave a partner. You would open up the chatbot and type in, “I want to break up with my boyfriend but I don’t know how.” Meeno will respond with a tip along the lines of being honest, empathetic, and clear. 

To get this out of the way and make sure it is clear, Meeno isn’t a relationship companion like Replika or Blush, the services that replicate human companions and allow erotic discussions. If you start any sexual or suggestive conversations on Meeno, the AI won’t engage.

The app’s design is inspired by the green and blues of the aurora borealis, with randomly dispersed memes and educational content that’s meant to be accessible. Users sign up with information like their sexual orientation, age, and ethnicity, which Nyborg says helps ensure the AI isn’t biased toward certain users.

Meeno will operate on a subscription model rather than rely on in-app ads to bring in revenue. The company, which is still testing how much to charge, is offering users who sign up before February a free year of premium.

Meeno is targeting Gen Z and young millennials in its initial launch, a notoriously lonely cohort that’s also technologically savvy. The goal is for the app to offer support in moments when a person may need guidance. “The need that I see is really for something to be by your side and help you think about practical solutions,” says Nyborg.

Maybe you see a therapist weekly but you really need guidance one day at 2 a.m. Or maybe you just moved to a new city and need help making friends. The app is meant to help you get through those challenges.

Even prior to the pandemic, Gen Z’s loneliness problem hit “epidemic levels,” according to a 2018 report from Cigna. Loneliness has long been a simmering fire, and the COVID-19-related global lockdowns only acted to fan the flames.

“There’s a unique issue with Gen Z around social isolation—specifically, around them not forming lasting and meaningful relationships. And that really, to me, comes down to an absence of the opportunity to build the skills that they need to do that,” says Megan Jones Bell, a Meeno investor who serves as Google’s clinical director of mental health. “There’s a missed developmental step that’s happened for an entire generation. They’re growing up in an environment where they had less opportunity to practice relationships.” 

It’s the app’s role, then, to serve as a practice ground for fostering relationships, both romantic and platonic. Because it’s built off of a large language model specifically, the educational content is easy to understand and conversational. The AI is trained on responses built by relationship professionals and guardrails are in place. 

“This is a really great example of appropriate use cases of LLM. It’s not mental health. It’s not clinical. You’re not treating somebody for a condition in this case,” Bell, who worked with Nyborg at Headspace, adds. “You’re helping them learn and practice something . . . the ability to have that practice is critical for learning a new skill.” 

Founders will often say that their companies were launched to help them tackle a problem they’ve experienced in life. Meeno is the app that Nyborg was looking for when, about a year ago, she was considering leaving her partner of seven years shortly after she left Tinder.

It was a highly publicized relationship for a time, because she had met him on Tinder. The couple ended their relationship, and Nyborg was primed for a fresh start. She had vowed to take a year off of work, spending much of her time reading about relationships, watching relationship content on TikTok, and learning about AI and machine learning on Coursera. 

She was voracious when it came to consuming content and she’d often send TikToks to trained therapists she knew who were able to help guide Nyborg to what was accurate or not. The issue with relationship advice on TikTok is there’s no “nutritional label” to verify who is qualified to say what or where the advice came from. (Nyborg is passionate about passing on the advice, too. I asked her which books were her favorite and she followed up with a detailed email suggesting seven different books based on our conversation.)

In the early months of her time off, Andrew Ng, the founder of an investment fund called AI Fund, reached out to Nyborg on LinkedIn to set up a meeting. The pair spoke last October, with Ng probing Nyborg on whether she was still interested in relationships and mental health. Yes, she said, she was essentially going back to school on those issues.

Ng predicted that artificial intelligence was about to take off in a big way, and that he wanted to help Nyborg with some type of relationship AI offering. Nyborg tried to push off any ideas until the summer of 2023, when her year-long hiatus would be up, but Ng was insistent that they were in the prime time. It was then or never.

“I actually recall I was a little bit nervous (to take the call),” Ng tells me. Nyborg made it five months on her break before starting what they were then calling Amorai. (The company recently changed its name to Meeno based on Meno’s Paradox, which is an essay by Plato that looks at how knowledge is obtained.)

Meeno, very much an upstart, has been working out of many different Airbnbs and offices. The company has nine employees currently and is hiring more. And Ng was correct that the huge undertaking of artificial intelligence was about to explode: Investors put more than $40 billion into AI startups in the first half of 2023, according to a Reuters report citing Pitchbook data.

Meeno has since raised its seed round, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from AI Fund, of $3.9 million, which brings its total funding to nearly $5 million. Ng is on Meeno’s board, and he and long-time Sequoia partner Roelof Botha are regularly advising Nyborg. Botha was connected with Nyborg days into the company’s existence, as she was presenting her plans to some of Ng’s investors. Botha says something “snapped into place,” thinking it was an incredible opportunity and emailed her during her session to learn more.

“She wants to solve this problem and share what she’s learned with many more people,” Botha says. “So, that authenticity to me is absolutely crucial.”