Insider Brief
- Ario, an AI-powered assistant for parents, raised $16 million in seed funding from top investors including Wing Venture Capital and Bain Capital Ventures.
- Ario helps parents save time by managing tasks like meal planning, scheduling, and personalized recommendations through app integrations with platforms like Amazon and Google Calendar.
- The platform prioritizes data privacy, ensuring users maintain control and ownership of their data while benefiting from Ario’s intelligent, context-aware assistance.
PRESS RELEASE — PALO ALTO, Calif. /June 26, 2024— (BUSINESS WIRE) — Ario, the AI-powered assistant for parents, today announced $16 million in seed funding from top-tier investors including Wing Venture Capital, Floodgate, Bain Capital Ventures, Moxxie, and prominent angels.
American parents spend hours per week managing their households, from meal planning for the family to scheduling playdates for their kids. Ario is on a mission to offload this invisible labor by understanding the personal context of a task and then taking intelligent actions to save parents precious time.
“Ario is building the AI personal assistant that real families need; hyper personal, pro-active and focused on bringing real, practical value to users,” said Floodgate founder Mike Maples. “With this investment we’re excited to see how this world-class team will unlock additional value for users, with more data integrations enabling increasingly nuanced custom recommendations and high-impact features laser-focused on freeing up parents’ time.”
Starting today, beta access is available to anyone. Ario takes personalized, intelligent action because it allows users to connect to the apps they use every day. If a user adds their Amazon, DoorDash, Google Calendar, and/or X (Twitter) accounts, Ario builds out a rich understanding of a user’s lifestyle, preferences, and routines to provide more time savings.
Ario can:
- Add an entire school schedule to the user’s Google Calendar from a single photo
- Identify schedule conflicts between a work meeting and a child’s soccer practice, and suggest solutions
- Remind users when their Amazon return is due and create personalized recommendations based on shopping habits
- Create a custom vacation itinerary, factoring in context like a child’s nap windows and developmentally appropriate activities
- Provide personalized restaurant recommendations and meal planning tips based on recent DoorDash orders
Critically, Ario takes a novel promise and approach to data; Ario enables users to access their own data from other platforms in minutes, and ensures users remain in full control when adding their data. Unlike other tools that sell user data to third parties or advertise on it, Ario helps users access their own data and exercise true data portability. When users connect apps to their Ario account, Ario does not claim ownership over that data. Furthermore, users can access their own data from other platforms in minutes, instead of completing the platforms’ own laborious “data access” requests, which take days and several steps.
“For years, consumers have had to choose between product functionality and maintaining data ownership,” said Sumit Agarwal, CEO and cofounder of Ario. “Ario is built in a way that will actually save people from the burden of life admin without sacrificing control.”
Ario’s leadership team is composed of experts in data privacy, cybersecurity and consumer products. Cofounder Sumit Agarwal was previously cofounder at Shape Security (acquired by F5), which protects B2C applications from automated fraud attacks, where Ario cofounder Mengmeng Chen also held a leadership role. Ario recently expanded its team with leaders from top consumer companies, such as Netflix and Uber, as well as Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Copilot and Turing teams.
Ario is currently available on iOS with Android coming soon. To learn more about the company and product, visit heyario.com.
About Ario
Ario is an AI life assistant that takes care of mundane tasks, giving time back to busy people. Ario connects with apps you use every day like Google Calendar, Amazon and DoorDash to reduce time spent on ongoing tasks like scheduling, anticipate needs for one-off tasks like returning items to a store, and provide personalized recommendations that reduce the amount of research required for purchase and travel decisions. Ario is headquartered in Palo Alto, California and is backed by leading investors such as Floodgate, Wing Venture Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Moxxie. Learn more at heyario.com or download the iOS app.
Contacts
JJ Ackles
hello@heyario.com
