|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
When Meta alum and mompreneur Dilani Kahawala first floated the idea of an AI family assistant in an online Bay Area Moms’ group, she was taken aback by the enthusiasm.
As a seasoned Silicon Valley professional, whose roles have included lead product manager at Meta and head of product management at Atlassian, Kahawala has no shortage of experience building tech solutions for others. But when she became a mother of three, she was inspired to develop a platform to manage her own life, and hoped it would also benefit the wider parenting community.
“I’d spent years building tech to help people get things done, and here was this enormous part of my own life that still depended on me and my husband remembering everything. I wanted help with it. I wanted to actually enjoy the little time we had together as a family,” Kahawala said.
In February, Kahawala began exploring the idea of creating an app that could intuitively sift through messages, emails, and calendar events and connect the dots before a parent could even reach for their phone in the morning.
“I love being a mom, but the amount of admin that comes with having children today is extraordinary,” Kahawala said, adding that her mind was always in two places, like trying to enjoy a family meal while processing the scheduling minutiae of the following day.
“I’d find myself tempted to pull out my phone and deal with it. Then I’d realize I’d spent part of our dinner together doing admin.”
In the early stages of building the personal assistant, parents in Kahawala’s professional cohort, whom she met while living in San Carlos and Redwood City, embraced the new technology in its beta beginnings.
“I posted about it in a Bay Area Moms in Tech Facebook group, and it really struck a nerve.” Kahawala said. “Parents wanted to try it straight away. Some had already been trying to build their own version…The first version was pretty basic but our beta group of parents were still using it almost daily.”
Alongside co-founder Mario Hasanakos and a team of engineers, Kahawala said she quickly built the AI agent to lighten the invisible load for busy parents by responding to voice prompts, sorting through incoming messages, delegating tasks to partners, scanning calendars to flag conflicts, and turning relevant information into actionable tasks. By the end of summer, the assistant named Anna was launched.
“We did a public launch in August and it went viral among parents across the world. That made us even more confident that we were solving a really painful problem…” Kahawala said.
One of the platform’s early users is Executive Assistant and mother of two Lena McNulty-Mom, who has provided high-level support at Venture Capital firms across the midPeninsula and wider Bay Area for over 15 years, and was impressed by Anna’s ability to help organize her own household.
Along with working full time outside the home, McNulty-Mom is a room parent at her children’s school in the South Bay and joked that Anna helps sift through the “900 emails” they send every day and flags important messages in ParentSquare, like when her daughter was in the nurse’s office and needed to be picked up.
“I think that Anna has helped a lot and reduced the noise,” she shared.
McNulty-Mom still relies on physical help for errands and hands-on organizational tasks at home through Mother’s Helper, a company that provides on-demand staff in several Bay Area counties, and describes Anna as a complementary service that can ease the mental burden of delegating.
“Using Anna alongside that, I can text whenever I’m thinking about it, like, ‘add this to the Mother’s Helper list’,” McNulty-Mom said.
And in just a few months, thousands of mothers with similar scheduling fatigue have also discovered Anna. Many of them reached out to Kahawala directly.
“We’ve received hundreds of messages from parents telling us how much they struggle with this,” Kahawala said. She shared one message from an R&D engineer in South San Francisco who wrote: “As a busy mom in biotech/tech, I’ve been playing around with Claude myself for the past six months trying to figure out how to solve this exact problem – the juggling circus act of a working mom. Thank you so much for already building it!”
As for Kahawala, Anna’s CEO, she feels a weight has been lifted from her shoulders.
“There are only so many evenings when your children are little and want to tell you everything,” she said. “I want parents to have more time and attention available for those moments.”
To find out more about Anna, visit https://www.hianna.ai/.
