Marrow

A companion
that actually
remembers you.

Private, warm, and yours. Reach it like a friend, or open the app and talk, live, in real time.

Investor brief Live on iOS, Android & Telegram Pre-monetization 2026
Read on
The thesis
The demand is proven. The grown-up, private version of it still hasn't been built.

The AI-companion market is real and funded. Replika, Character.ai and Nomi proved that millions of people want something to talk to that knows them. But the category split into two dead ends: romance-and-roleplay toys people outgrow, and clinical workbooks that never feel like a companion. Marrow is the third thing: a warm, private companion for adults that genuinely remembers you, and meets you both ways, as easy to reach as a text and as real as a voice on the phone.

The problem

The tools forget you. The category burned its trust.

Two things are true at once: general AI has no real memory of your life, and the apps that promised memory turned into toys people are now embarrassed to have on their phone. There's a mature audience with nowhere grounded to go.

Amnesia

They reset

ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are task engines. Bolted-on "memory" is shallow and their context refreshes; Character.ai famously forgets the premise within a conversation. Nothing accumulates into knowing you.

Reputation

The toys turned toxic

Replika took a €5M GDPR fine and years of reputational damage. The "AI girlfriend/boyfriend" wave (Kindroid, Dusk) leans into roleplay and parasocial romance. It's exactly what mature users outgrow.

Rigidity

Clinical & cold

Woebot and Wysa are structured CBT workbooks, not companions. Anxiety-first tools like Stella are hyper-clinical. Useful, but they don't feel like someone who has time for you.

A grown, well-connected audience wants to be remembered, without a therapy workbook or a digital soulmate.
The insight: the neutral room

Some things you can't say to anyone, because of who everyone is to you.

This isn't a product for lonely people. It's for people with full lives. Every human confidant comes with stakes: a relationship to you, a side to take, a verdict they'll keep. There's a whole class of things you carry that you can't hand to anyone you know. Marrow is the room with no stake, no side, and no verdict, that still remembers your whole story.

1

Structural impossibility

The person you'd normally process it with is the subject, or married to it.

"You can love him completely and still need to say something he can never unhear."
2

Contamination

Venting to a person leaves residue. Your bad day becomes their permanent, unconscious bias. You can't un-tell it.

"Say it here, so it doesn't land on someone who'll carry it."
3

Curated confirmation

You pick your confidant by the verdict you want. Talking to friends is often asking a rigged jury.

"You don't need agreement. You need to hear yourself think."

This de-stigmatizes the whole category and makes privacy intrinsic: the message literally is "it goes nowhere." It also arms the isolation defense: Marrow absorbs the vent so the relationship doesn't have to. It protects real connection instead of replacing it.

What it is

One memory. Five ways to be met. Any way you want to talk.

A warm, calm companion that remembers across every conversation and understands how the people and moments in your life connect. Reach it by text, by voice note, or by a live call.

Switch styles any time. The memory underneath stays the same person.

❤ Marrow

Warm and emotionally alive. The companion that genuinely knows you.

🧭 Counsellor

Reflective; holds space without judgement.

🧗 Mentor

Direct and energising; helps you think, then move.

📔 Journal

Ultra-brief. Just holds it.

🦉 Philosopher

Curious and deep; engages the idea itself.

Reach and depth

As easy to reach as a text. As real as a voice on the phone.

Most companions ask you to live inside one app. Marrow meets you on your terms: start by texting it in a chat you already use, or open a native app built to be genuinely beautiful and simply talk to it. The same memory sits underneath, whichever way you reach in.

Marrow
typing…
You mentioned the Sunday lunch with his mother again. That's the third weekend it's cost you.
yeah. i can't say any of this to him
You don't have to. Say it here. It stays here.
Live voice, the part people remember
  • Call Marrow and simply talk. It listens and responds in real time, in seven languages, the way a phone call feels.
  • A warm, low, unhurried voice, never a chirpy assistant. For most people it is the moment the product clicks.
A beautiful app, and an easy front door
  • A considered native app on iOS and Android for the full experience: live voice, your history, the five styles.
  • Or begin in Telegram with a single message, no download, so the very first conversation costs nothing.

On WhatsApp, a deliberate call. WhatsApp is the obvious growth lever, but routing intimate conversations through it hands Meta the very thoughts people came to Marrow to protect. So the low-friction text channel is Telegram-first by design. A WhatsApp surface is on the table only with an architecture that keeps our privacy promise intact. We won't grow by quietly breaking the one thing this category can't afford to break.

Moat 1: memory that understands

It doesn't just remember what you said. It understands how it all fits together.

Most "memory" is shallow vector recall: fetch a similar past sentence. Marrow also builds a private, per-user graph world-model, mapping the people, feelings and triggers in your life and the relationships between them. That structure is what lets it connect what you say today to what you said months ago, and grasp who and what is really at play.

knows feels triggers
Structural

A graph, not a log

Entities and KNOWS / FEELS / TRIGGERS edges extracted from every conversation. A living map of your world, not a transcript.

Emotional

Feelings that decay

Emotions carry intensity and fade over time the way real ones do, so Marrow tracks how you feel now, not how you felt once, forever.

Compounding

Retention is the product

Every conversation deepens the model. The longer you stay, the more it knows and the harder it is to leave. Memory is the switching cost.

Moat 2: privacy as architecture

The one thing this category keeps breaking, we built around.

An app that "remembers everything" triggers an instinctive fear. So privacy isn't a policy page here. It sits next to every memory claim, and it is load-bearing.

Nomi and Kindroid store vast behavioural data to work. Replika was fined. That fear is the category's open wound, and our entry point with the exact audience that fled it.

  • Never trained on. Never sold.Your conversations aren't used to train models or handed to advertisers. That's the deal, stated plainly.
  • Deletable in one tapForget the whole person (transcript, vectors, and every edge in the graph) instantly, from any surface.
  • Encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM)Message and graph content are encrypted in the database, with encrypted nightly offsite backups.
  • Honest by constructionWe don't dress "mostly private" as a guarantee. The posture is stated exactly: the one credible path to a hard "nothing leaves" promise is self-hosting the model, and we've mapped it.
Where we sit

Alone in the quadrant that matters.

Two axes decide this market: what the thing is for (roleplay and romance, or grounded reflection), and whether it truly remembers you (shallow recall, or a deep, structured memory of your life). Everyone clusters low and left. The corner that is both grounded and genuinely remembers sits empty.

Remembers you
Forgets you
Roleplay & romance
Grounded reflection
the open corner
Replika
Character.ai
Kindroid
Dusk
Nomi
Wysa · Woebot
Stella
ChatGPT · Gemini
Marrow

Grounded reflection, warm but never flirtatious, with a deep, structured memory of your life underneath. No incumbent occupies it.

Why now

The three curves just crossed.

Capable & cheap

Models are ready

Frontier models are finally warm, multilingual and low-latency enough to feel like a person, and cheap enough per message that a monthly subscription still carries real margin.

Trust vacuum

The audience is fleeing

The GDPR fines and the "AI girlfriend" backlash created a mature cohort actively looking for a grounded, private alternative. The demand is proven; the trust is up for grabs.

Voice got real

It finally sounds human

Real-time voice is now low-latency and natural enough to feel like a call with a person, not a robot. That turns live voice from a novelty into the thing people stay for.

The business

Subscription, built to be capital-efficient.

Chat
$5.99 / mo

Unlimited text, full long-term memory, all five styles, voice notes in. 3-day trial, no card.

Most popular
Live
$11.99 / mo

Everything in Chat, plus real-time voice calls in 7 languages. Marrow speaks back.

Cost base

Runs on one box

The entire production stack (Postgres, pgvector, Redis, workers, auto-TLS) runs on a single dedicated server. Burn is low by design; the model API is the main variable cost.

Unit economics

Memory = low churn

The switching cost is the accumulated memory. For a subscription, a compounding reason to stay is the whole game, and here it is the core of the product, not a bolt-on.

Reach

Live on every surface

iOS App Store, Google Play, and Telegram, in 7 languages, from day one. The distribution surface is already built and shipping.

Where we are, honestly

Product shipped. Loop unproven. That's the raise.

3
live surfaces: iOS, Android, Telegram
5
companion styles, one shared memory
7
languages, incl. live voice
$5.99
entry price · 3-day trial, no card

We're just out of beta: a production-grade product live across three surfaces and two app stores, with a real memory engine and privacy posture behind it, and pre-monetization by choice.

The single riskiest thing in this business isn't whether we can build it. It's built, encrypted, and shipping. The open question is whether cold users, not the friends-and-family beta, will pay and stay. That's a funnel question, and it's the one thing money buys down fastest.

The ask funds exactly that: a measured acquisition test to reach the first paying cohort of strangers, instrument activation, trial, paid and retention end to end, and identify the one channel that scales before pouring fuel on it.

Capital-efficient by construction: the product and infrastructure are done. Nearly every franc goes to proving the loop, not rebuilding the machine.

The ask

CHF 300k, aimed almost entirely at growth.

The product and the infrastructure are already built and paid for. This round buys one thing: the answer to whether cold strangers pay and stay, and the channel that scales once they do.

CHF 300,000
On a SAFE, capped so this round is at most 30% of the company (a CHF 1.0M post-money cap). Post-product, pre-revenue.
Marketing & growth95%
Ops & tooling5%
Nearly every franc goes into acquisition and the analytics to read it. No new build; the machine is done.

Where the marketing goes

Paid, high-intent

App-store search ads

Apple Search Ads and Google Ads against what people actually type ("someone to talk to," "somewhere to vent"), landing on the store listing. Concentrated language bets to start, in German and Spanish, with every install attributable by promo code and UTM, and clinical or romance intent negated out to protect the brand.

Earned, shareable

Creators, influencers & ambassadors

Instagram and TikTok built on the "neutral room" idea: a truth about social life before it is an app pitch, so it earns organic reach. Warm creators whose audiences are strangers to us, plus an ambassador program, each carrying their own code so we see exactly who converts.

The plan is not "spend 300k on ads." It is to spend a measured slice finding what converts cold strangers, prove the payback, then pour the rest into only that.

What it proves in 12 months

Phase 1

A real CAC

First paying cohorts of cold users, with a measured cost per paying subscriber to weigh against the ceiling our pricing supports (roughly CHF 12 to 15).

The thesis

A retention baseline

D7 and D30 on strangers, not friends and family. For a memory product, retention is the whole argument, and this is the first honest read of it.

Phase 2

A channel that scales

At least one creator, format, or market proven to deliver retaining payers below the ceiling, so the next round is a scale decision, not another experiment.

A companion that remembers
"I'm here,
and I remember."

The place to say the things you carry around but never say out loud. It keeps your whole story, and answers to no one else.

marrowcompanion.com nils.rohwer@gmail.com
Marrow investor brief. Confidential. Figures reflect product status as of 2026; user and revenue traction is early and stated plainly above, and nothing here is projected as achieved. Product claims (graph world-model, AES-256-GCM encryption at rest, live surfaces, pricing, languages) reflect the shipped system. Competitor characterisations are drawn from public information and the founder's category analysis.