Meet Milo, the Atlanta-founded tech startup making bedtime effortlessly fun for children and adults alike through the power of AI.
Milo brings narratives to life by creating personalized bedtime stories in seconds. By entering in a name, age and topic, the app generates a unique children’s story with illustrations and narrations.
Once generated, users are able to view and upload these stories on the Milo community page, where they can also view other users’ creations. The story can be shared via other mobile applications, like iMessage, email and social media platforms as well. To access these features, users pay an annual $39.99 subscription, with monthly and weekly payment options available.
Milo was founded in December 2022 and officially launched this past April. Since then, it has continued to climb up the Apple Store rankings, earning #186 in the book apps category for the United States this past week. The app has had over 5,000 downloads to date, increasing daily.
Milo founders Max Irvine and Pooya Nayebi met at the Georgia Institute of Technology and soon after graduating built their partnership around a shared vision that extends beyond the use of bedtime stories solely for entertainment.
Both Irvine and Nayebi have learning disabilities – dyslexia and ADHD – which made learning to read a challenge.
“Reading and learning to read was incredibly difficult and it took a lot longer for me than most kids. But a lot of the reason for that was because it was not entertaining to me,” said Irvine.
This hardship inspired the long-term vision for Milo to grow into an educational tool – one that maintains an element of fun.
“We want to be an app that can compete with the other “fun” apps kids are often distracted by on their iPads,” Nayebi told Hypepotamus.
THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS
As the Milo team enters 2024, their focus is on enhancing personalization features on the app, expanding their user base, and adding more educational elements into the app.
“An educational element, for example, is the narration feature we added for kids to follow along with the story. We want to advance Milo by adding more educational features, like highlighting each word as it is read aloud, adding an in-app dictionary and different reading-pace options. We want to add these elements in a fun way, which will take a lot of good design,” Irvine told Hypepotamus.
Long term, Milo hopes to add listening functionality to the platform to provide real-time feedback on users’ verbal reading.
Milo is interested in bringing on additional funding in the future. Interested investors can reach out to founders Max Irvine at max@getmilo.io and Pooja Nayebi at pooya@getmilo.io for more information.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jamie Miller is based in Atlanta and graduated from the University of Georgia with bachelor’s degrees in Journalism and Business Management. When she is not writing or working as a Business Consultant at Ernst & Young, she can be found reading a good book (anything from Harry Potter to Brene Brown), sipping an espresso martini at the neighborhood bar or hunting the flower aisle at Trader Joe’s. She aspires to produce diverse and valuable journalism for the world in the hopes that it inspires others to become lifelong learners who seek first to understand, then to be understood. Read her portfolio here.
