✨ I’m excited to announce what we’ve been working on for the last few months: the creation of Yuna, an AI and storytelling startup, and our $1.6 million dollar pre-seed round ✨
So what’s the story?
The sobering reality is that the magic of reading books is slowly being replaced by other forms of media. Each successive generation is enjoying fewer of the well known benefits that come with getting lost in a wonderful book (cognitive development, creativity, empathy, to name but a few).
What if we could reverse this trend? What if we could find a way to make reading just as ‘engaging’ as watching Netflix, and eventually the 1st entertainment choice for children?
And so we wrote Yuna into existence. By combining AI with the enchantment of human creativity, Yuna writes books that are so personalised and interactive that they can be as engaging as any modern media platforms. Leveraging AI to empower writers, illustrators and publishers, Yuna imagines new forms of storytelling:
✨ Imagine a book that every night writes the next chapter of a personalised adventure involving you, your daughter and dog, weaving your family’s interests into the narrative.
✨ Imagine a book that invites your niece to enter Hogwarts as a 1st year student and experience their own unique story through the wizarding world.
✨ Imagine a book that helps you discuss difficult topics with your son but in the form of an imaginary tale with him and his favourite character Snoopy.
Over time, we hope to make these dreams come true, all with a singular goal: to ensure that children build a healthy reading habit for life.
Thanks to the hard work of the incredible Yuna team, we’ve been testing early versions of these ideas. Over the past 5 months, Yuna has written 100,000+ unique stories to 20,000 monthly active users. And we are growing fast - we expect to write the next 100,000 books within a few weeks of this announcement. Thank you Yuna team - you are truly epic.
A massive thank you to the partners involved in our $1.6M pre-seed round: Canary who led and who have been incredible every day since (special shoutout to Florian Hagenbuch who has been a believer and mentor from day -1); The Positive Ventures team and angel investors who followed the round and recognised Yuna’s potential to make a positive impact on the world (thank you especially to Fábio Kestenbaum!). Finally - Taahir Munshi, Pedro Sônego de Oliveira, Flora Oliveira, Fabian Wikstrom and Carolina Guimarães, who played pivotal roles in turning Yuna from distant dream to reality during those early days.
Now what?
Today, we are launching our beta test product in Brazil in Portuguese. If you are in Brazil, please give it a shot (see link in comments). If you are not, Yuna isn’t available to test just yet, but fear not! Yuna is bringing its vision to the 🌎 very soon.
Want to learn more about Yuna? Check out the amazing articles by EXAME, Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios and Startups in the comments below.
