Mission: Empathy is for everyone.

Our mission is to improve outcomes, improve trust, and increase loyalty and engagement through receiver centric communication improvement.

Vision: Keeping AI human, ethical, and accurate

Human trust and accurate understanding are central to all communications. That’s why we started with empathy. Our vision is to become the leader in relational AI and, more radically, to become the human translation layer in communications to better conversations on all channels. We strive to help people and organizations develop skills for greater understanding, compassion, and insight via AI assistance.

What do we do?

In the future, 70% of jobs will be automated with generative AI and reduce half of the time employees spend working. Approximately 79% of working women have positions that are susceptible to automation versus 58% of working men. AI-human interactions may preference a particular group (AI bias) or be inaccessible to marginalized populations; they potentially will lose the essential human qualities of empathy, rapport, trust and alliance. We want to prevent those problems by proactively keeping the human in AI in an ethical and accurate way.

We are solving the core problem of AI augmentation. We capture signals in human interactions (e.g., empathy, trust, awkwardness, risk) and building unique models. We are starting with the highest near term ROI use cases, in medical monitoring and pharma.

What are we doing differently?

• We build authentic connections with AI support
• We go beyond sentiment detection to identify actionable insights, specific behaviors and unconscious language style.
• We go beyond passive analytic dashboards to active real-time training and feedback.
• And finally, we will be going beyond empathy to transform communication into any human tone, emotion, and conversational style – all rooted in ethical and traceable data sources.

Core Values

Core values are the fundamental beliefs of the organization; they describe or define the culture.

Empathy is for everyone

Our company defines empathy as attuned and accurate understanding; this means the customer, the speaker, the user, the patient, the team member defines empathy; only they know when they are understood. We train team members in reflective and empathetic listening skills and strive to use our product internally to embody this core value.

Strive to be anti-racist, intersectional and focused on equity in AI.

Anti-racist. We strive to accept that inequities in education, criminal justice, housing, and many other critical life and policy areas are the result of intentional and racist institutional policies and practices. Institutional inequities exist on purpose. Our commitment to anti-racism means that we shift our focus from the intent of our actions to the outcome of our actions – we consider whether we advance racial equity or uphold racial inequity.

Intersectional. We strive to recognize that some folks belong to multiple historically minoritized groups. The systemic oppression individuals face is not additive but instead synergistic. In practice we view everything—from hiring to the customer to our product—as reflecting the complexity of the human experience. For example, we do not consider gender or feminism without centering race, social class and other aspects of identity. Learn more about what this means by reading Lisa Bowleg‘s research.

Equity in AI. We strive to actively insert racial and cultural equity into our decision-making processes, beginning with project design and through project evaluation. We plan to have a process for identifying and addressing the impact of the design and implementation of our work on minoritized individuals and groups, and we work to identify and eliminate barriers.

Be playful, authentic, and collaborative

We collaborate and value teamwork above “rockstar” culture. We don’t pretend to be corporate robots. Instead, we embrace play, humor, and human authenticity at work and in our products. We may need to code-switch and be fluent in the language of tech, but we don’t forget who we are. As empathic managers, we try to embody our “favorite teacher” in our lives who aspires to be someone who is genuine, personable, and may self-disclose stories and experiences from their learning. Customer facing roles have some exceptions to total authenticity but even there, our tone is synchronized to the customer while also personable and empathic.

Move fast with integrity towards discomfort with safety

Move fast with integrity. We move fast and try not to break things. We would rather try and learn fast versus do something slowly and perfectly to start. Speed to deliver value to the customer is a new experimentation goal in the Seed to Series A as we seek product-market fit. If something breaks when moving fast, we admit and take responsibility for mistakes as transparently as possible.

Towards discomfort with safety. The concept of moving to discomfort is similar to radical acceptance; the idea that to release suffering you accept discomfort versus avoid, walk around it, or reject it. If our customers aren’t feeling pain when our product malfunctions they didn’t really need us. The spirit of this value is not to knowingly or maliciously create problems but rather to accept them as inevitable. The spirit is not to push people beyond what they can tolerate but rather for managers to create an environment of psychological safety, such that we can hold discomfort together. We do not shy away from new, experimental, or unknown actions or even boring necessary actions simply because they cause us pain. We embrace this as part of the process and in the embrace, we actually reduce the suffering.

• With data when possible! We make assumptions and get as much data as possible to back them up. We intentionally interpret data versus accepting it without question; this is especially the case for AI bias. When there is no data, we make executive decisions quickly. We reduce executive decisions over time. We test first and engineer last. We put ideas in front of users and customers as quickly as possible to get feedback before dedicating more time and resources.

There is always an AND: Embrace the dialectic.

At mpathic, multiple truths co-exist at once which require us to be flexible in our thinking and challenge us to continue to move forward without certainty. We can get excited about people and ideas while also questioning them. We can sell to companies and not buy into their value systems; we can sell to companies and challenge their value systems. We can value anti-racism and operate in a system (venture-backed tech) that challenges or undermines those principals daily. We can value execution and performance of employees (KPIs) and make exceptions when life gets too big. We can disagree with team members on certain ideas and choose to work collaboratively with them. Holding two truths in balance, sometimes which are diametrically opposed, is part of what dialectical thinking involves. It’s not about either or, it’s about finding the middle path with AND. Many of the values listed above reflect this balance.