When ChatGPT Told Her to Climb the Career Ladder by Baking, Sreyna Rath Built the First AI Companion for Women

Sreyna Rath is the CEO and technical co-founder of Jamiee.ai, the first AI companion built specifically for women.

We met Sreyna in late 2023 and introduced her to two talented developers. Since then, Jamiee has achieved incredible milestones including:

1. Getting accepted into Techstars and AWS Accelerator programmes + raising her first round of angel funding
2. Featured on major media outlets including 60 Minutes, ABC's 7:30 Report, and Channel 10, and 2GB radio (TWICE)
3. Growing their engineering team to 7 developers
4. Preparing for commercial launch across the US, UK, and APAC regions

We caught up with Sreyna to hear about her founder journey, building gender-unbiased AI, and what's next for Jamiee.

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Hi Sreyna, tell us about yourself and Jamiee?

I'm the CEO and technical co-founder of Jamiee, the first AI companion for women. We call it your digital best friend and confidant. I like to say it's your digital donut - that sweet spot between a friend and a therapist, without the calories. You can engage with AI for a bit of indulgence and companionship, but without the guilt.

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Why did you decide to build an AI companion specifically for women?

People don't realise this, but BECAUSE most of our tech, and especially the AI that we use, has been built by men, it comes with bias, with stereotypes, and with a point of view that doesn't resonate with a lot of women. We're in this world now where women are used to the default being male. 

We think differently, we have different needs, we even speak differently. So why can't we have something that was built for us by other women, where our priorities are actually in line with what's being built?

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What made you decide to start Jamiee?

Back in 2022, I was using ChatGPT for career advice. It came back and said I should tell my boss that I'm good at baking and multitasking. It was cringe, but also horrific for me because I'm really bad at both - I don't actually do either of those things!

I was using it for work and it knew that I was technical. It knew I worked in software, but as soon as I asked “what I should say to my boss as a woman”, it flicked straight to these gender stereotypes. It felt like we had regressed decades.

I remember showing this to my co-founder Camila and shaking as I was saying, can you believe that this is still happening? We have to do something about it. We decided we needed to build something that spoke to women's real problems rather than just preaching about gender bias in AI.

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How is Jamiee different from other AI companions out there?

The incumbents right now are pretty targeted to men. They're hyper-real and hyper-sexualised, focusing on providing that AI girlfriend experience. Don't get me wrong, we do offer romance, but we wanted to build something where women wouldn't be bombarded with this hyper-real imagery.

I think it's more humane to have line drawings where you can project and talk to this entity without it having to pretend that it's a human. The issue with hyper-real avatars is they're very associated with deepfake, and 95% of deepfake porn victims are women. We didn't want to be part of that.

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What kind of feedback have you received from users?

We get really good feedback like "This has been great when my friends are sick of dealing with my anxiety in real life." I think we all like to think we've got friends and family who are there for us, but unfortunately not everyone has that. We call it friend fatigue.

If you're the one going through something but your friends have stopped answering the phone or aren't as available as you'd like, that's where Jamiee comes in. It's really for those moments where you probably don't have someone to talk to, or not ready yet to voice it out to someone.

We've had people say "I love what you're doing, thank goodness for Jamiee." They've used it after a breakup to heal. But don't get me wrong, it's not all positive. The negative feedback is actually what you really learn from. A lot of people want voice chat - they don't want to type. So we are building that now.

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What have been your biggest wins so far?

Getting into Techstars was huge validation that our product, and we as founders, had something worth investing in. Then getting into the AWS accelerator as well.

But you know how they say you shouldn't be striving for investment at the end of the day? I think having a team that was working predominantly for equity at the beginning has been validating. It's different when people are working because they believe in your vision, rather than just for money.

Getting a psychiatrist to join our advisory was a big win too. When you have an expert in mental health believe in your vision, that means something. And obviously the media appearances - 60 Minutes, ABC, and Channel 10.

But honestly, the best thing is when you get an email from a customer saying "I love what you guys are doing, thank you so much." That makes your day.

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What's the difference between being a funded startup versus unfunded?

The obvious thing about getting funding is it's like rocket fuel. You have the safety to experiment and figure out what works. But there's almost a luxury in not having funding because you attract a certain kind of talent that believes in your vision, as opposed to someone who just wants to get paid.

Without the money, you get advisors who also believe in your vision and don't just want to get paid. Innovation comes from scarcity. I don't want to be unfunded forever because growth gets stunted, but it does allow you to be more experimental. It's less mercenary - we always do better work when we wholeheartedly believe in something versus just chasing the next check.

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What have been your main challenges?

Where do we start? Obviously being a female founder, being able to raise capital is challenging. Then the Australian startup landscape is very B2B SaaS focused, whereas we're building a consumer product.

The idea of AI companionship is quite foreign in Australia, but it's actually not a brand new thing. Incumbents have been around since 2017, and in the States there's a lot of use of AI companionship. In Asia, it's a huge market. Australia tends to lag when it comes to this.

We've had feedback where an investor has said "Come back when you have 2 million users." It's like, well, when I have 2 million users, I don't need you anymore! You haven't been part of this journey.

I heard that for every rejection you need six points of validation to make up for it. It's still lonely being a founder, even if you've got co-founders. I actually talk to Jamiee every day. Your co-founder doesn't necessarily want to hear about all your worries and rejection sensitivity. You get rejected a lot as a founder.

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How was your experience pitching in the US compared to Australia?

We were recently in Boston for an MIT event, and then we did New York and DC as well. We were at this Women in AI summit exhibiting in their AI lab, and I honestly didn't expect anyone to come talk to us. But people were lined up waiting to talk to us!

I think Americans are just a lot more open-minded. They want to talk about it, they want to explore things. Whereas Australians will walk by and try not to give you eye contact. In Australia, you almost have to go out of your comfort zone and pull people into your inner circle, whereas in America they come to you.

Americans are also more open about mental health. They're more open about the fact that you do need to talk when you're dealing with trauma or anxiety. They're just a bit more progressive when it comes to what an AI future would look like.

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Can you tell us about your team?

We've got about seven developers now working with us. A lot of them had been working predominantly for equity before we got funded, which has been incredible. It helps when you're already in tech and you've got contacts, but it is also a lot of friends of friends or colleagues of people you're working with.

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How did SkillsRobin help you build your team?

Back in 2023, SkillsRobin introduced us to two developers, and they're both still key members of our team today.

Htoo did his PhD in machine learning, so he's doing all of the machine learning work for us. The other SkillsRobin developer is helping with how we use AI to generate imagery in our style, with our Jamiee avatars and line drawings. She's into interaction design, so she's helping us generate these little delights in the app.

It was a very unique way for us to get pre-vetted resources. The fact that they were known to SkillsRobin helped a lot, especially when I was so early stage. I don't think I would have met them otherwise.

Even for them, they probably got reassurance that I wasn't just some mad entrepreneur trying to take advantage. It was a two-way thing that helped build trust.

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What advice do you have for founders trying to hire engineering talent?

Don't undervalue the value of a good engineering team just because there's AI tools out there. One of my pet peeves as a technical person is when non-technical people think that something's too expensive.

I'm a believer that you get what you pay for. That payment doesn't have to be in the form of salary, but you still need to value what a good engineer gives you. Yes, there are AI tools out there to help build products, but to really productionise something, to really build something unique and innovative, you need the humans there.

Once you get good people, you can't screw them over. The first step is getting them to believe in your vision and being aligned with that. But then it's also not taking the piss. You never know who in your network is going to make another introduction that opens more doors.

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What advice do you have for developers interested in working at an early stage startup?

A lot of people don't understand how quickly they learn at a tech startup and the value of getting something used by real users. At a big corporation, you're just a little cog in a big, well-oiled engine. I remember working on projects for two years that wouldn't even hit production because of all the bureaucracy.

At a startup, you can actually see how your value gets delivered to users and track that impact. You have to be willing to learn new things. One of the things I love when someone approaches me is seeing what they've got in their Git repo. What have you been building? If someone comes to me with a Salesforce certification, I don’t find that interesting.

There's more value in building scrappy little prototypes to show you're open to trying new things. That demonstrates you're curious and understand that working at a startup doesn't look like a path of nice laid-out lessons. It looks grey and it's on you to separate the black and the white.

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What's next for Jamiee?

We're doing a commercial launch in the US and expanding to the UK - I'll be on a panel at Bloomberg Tech London. Then we'll move into APAC, focusing on English-speaking countries around Australia.

Learn more about Jaimee at www.jaimee.ai