Bliss - When translation is not enough

Mental health interventions must go beyond language. Kerstin et al. 2021 have shown that accounting for the values, relationships, and context is key for people to understand their own distress. Shame, family structure, and trust each carry meanings shaped by culture, factors that LLM systems trained on Western clinical data may not account for.

Bliss, headquartered in Helsinki and originally founded in Albania, was established to address this gap. The company was founded by Jona Doda, an LSE alumna and former growth leader across European fintech and proptech ventures.

The platform pairs users with licensed therapists using AI-driven cultural and linguistic profiling. Its primary product is a therapist-trained digital companion: an AI system modelled on a specific clinician's tone and therapeutic approach, designed to extend care between sessions. The company describes this as a clinician-supervised extension rather than a standalone large language model application.

With frontier models being increasingly positioned as digital companions, demand has grown for clinically credible and demographically specific AI therapy tools. Bliss reports early B2B traction at Raiffeisen Bank and over 50 licensed therapists onboarded across 10 or more countries.

Operations currently span Tirana and Helsinki, with users across 10 countries. The company has raised €232,400 ($270,000) in an angel round led by Keiretsu Forum, Finest Love VC, and Plug and Play.

As the EU AI Act sets a new compliance floor for mental health AI, Bliss is taking one more step, building in line with European values while not only following regulations.

Sources: EU-Startups / GlobeNewswire / Tech.eu Founder: Jona Doda, CEO

Founder: Jona Doda (CEO)