An old piece of received wisdom in the tech world says you should never co-found a startup with your spouse.

But there are good examples where it has worked, and today’s startup is hoping to be another successful startup founded by a married couple.

Read on to find out all about Recallify…

– Martin

Recallify is making AI productivity work for people with neurological conditions

Some people need a bit more help than others to stay on track in their day-to-day lives.

This is a fact Sarah Rudebeck knows well, thanks to her experience as a clinical psychologist working with people who have neurological conditions. And thanks to this, she saw an entrepreneurial opening to employ generative AI.

“I saw the massive gap that existed. There were no AI tools created for people with neurological and cognitive difficulties, where it was making the AI accessible to them so they could use it in their day to day lives, and it can help support the cognitive functions that they're having difficulties with,” Rudebeck explains.

“One of the main things AI can do is capture complex information that's hard for people to process or remember because of different cognitive needs, and summarise that information very quickly and eloquently.”

And so she teamed up with her husband, tech entrepreneur Berkan Sesen, to create the app her patients could benefit from.

Together, they’ve developed Recallify, a “memory and learning companion” designed to help users to record, review, and recall experiences in their lives.

“The main point of it is to distill down what can be, sometimes, a busy and complex world into a nice, easy summary for people to look back at, and so they can get on better in their work and day-to-day lives,” Rudebeck says.

A typical user for Recallify, Rudebeck says, would be someone who has suffered a brain injury, a stroke, or a brain tumour, and finds themselves no longer able to retain and process information as easily as they once could.

The Recallify mobile app lets users record and transcribe audio and video of events in their lives as they happen. They can then browse a timeline of events with AI-generated summaries, search these ‘memories’ for specific information, and even test their memory with quizzes based on the data the app has collected. The app also supports uploads such as text files.

Rudebeck and Sesen say users utilise the app in both their personal and professional lives, for example to stay on top of all the information from a meeting they might be too fatigued to focus on fully in real-time. Others use it to help them make sense of large text documents.

A lot of what Recallify does could be done slightly differently or in a more complicated way, with other AI tools. So, how big is the market for an app like this, tuned to the needs of people with cognitive challenges?

Sesen points to a World Health Organization linked study which found that in 2021, more than 3 billion people worldwide were living with a neurological condition. And a commonly quote statistic says around 15% of the population is neurodiverse.

“These are umbrella terms, but still, the numbers are massive,” says Sesen.

“And if you were to focus on even a subset within the neurological conditions umbrella which is acquired brain injuries, it may initially come across as quite a niche condition. but unfortunately, just in the UK, 1.3 million are affected by it.”

In fact, the size of the overall market can be hidden in our day-to-day lives, Rudebek adds:

“Often, your intellectual abilities aren't affected. You seem like the same person, your personality remains the same, but you just can't often continue with the same heavy memory, attention, and cognitive executive planning and multitasking that you used to in work.

“So often, people don’t perceive others to have these cognitive difficulties, but actually they have massive impact on their ability to work. And many people just leave the workforce and retire after these types of things have happened to them. So it's really about trying to support people to stay in work or to do what they want to.”

The economic impact of neurological disorders was clocked at $295 billion worldwide in 2019 alone, in one study. And while some of that figure would be outside the scope of Recallify as it stands, it at least shows there’s a significant economic effect caused by such challenges.

The story so far

Rudebeck and Sesen have been a couple for 15 years after meeting at the University of Oxford, where they both did their PhDs.

They says the idea for Recallify came in particular from a teenager with severe amnesia who Rudebeck was treating.

“I didn’t express this to the patient, but I became very frustrated with how low-tech the strategies people were talking about for rehab. It was dictaphones and technology we're just not using anymore,” Rudebeck says.

“So it was really my desire to bring things up to date, and to try to get AI actually accessible to people with a neurological condition who really need it.”

Sesen led on development of an MVP and says the tested on close to 400 people ahead of an official launch on iOS and Android in February this year.

Sesen says they have 650 users at present, acquired through word of mouth, and they’re working on refining the product-market fit before they begin actively marketing it.

This involves testing with users across a range of different neurological conditions, with the help of relevant charities. Meanwhile, Sesen says some users with ADHD and Austism have found the app by themselves. He says the app’s interface might be adapted for the needs of different segments of the userbase over time, either as the same app or as separate apps for different users groups.

In the coming months, Rudebeck and Sesen want to start reaching beyond the UK into the US market.

The app is currently available via a straightforward B2C freemium subscription model, with the paid option costing £7.49 per month. However, the startup wants to expand into a B2B2C offering to ramp up its revenue potential, selling through the likes of clinics, hospitals, insurers, or medical legal companies, particularly in the US market.

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