What is Sonia?
Sonia is an AI mental wellness app that conducts complete conversational sessions — by voice or text — modeled on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. Available anytime through a phone app, Sonia guides users through structured 15–30 minute check-ins, remembers context between sessions, assigns reflective exercises, and tracks progress on measures like GAD-7 anxiety scores. It's designed for the enormous population that can't access or afford traditional therapy, at a fraction of the cost.
The team
Sonia was founded in 2023 by Dustin Klebe, Lukas Wolf, and Chris Aeberli — three AI researchers who studied together at ETH Zürich before graduate research at MIT, publishing at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, and EMNLP. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and raised a $3.4M seed round from investors including founders of Reddit, Instacart, and Verkada. The team reports meaningful anxiety-score reductions after two weeks of use.
Safety-first approach
Sonia builds in crisis-detection protocols that redirect users to human resources like the 988 Lifeline, and positions itself explicitly as a mental wellness companion for the therapy gap — not a replacement for clinical care in severe cases.