The AI Movement with Brooke
The AI Movement with Brooke, explores how entrepreneurs, founders, creatives, and leaders are navigating the rapidly changing world of AI.
Through real conversations with people building, experimenting, pivoting, and growing with AI, Brooke goes beyond the latest tools to uncover how this technology is changing the way we work, make decisions, build businesses, create, and define success.
The AI Movement with Brooke
An AI Companion for Pregnancy Loss | Melissa Ablett-Jordaan, Sibyl
After experiencing three pregnancy losses, Melissa Ablett-Jordaan couldn't stop thinking about the support she wished existed. She eventually left her COO role and founded Sibyl, an AI companion designed to support women through pregnancy loss. We talk about becoming a first-time founder and the responsibility of building something people may turn to during a deeply vulnerable moment.
Recorded live at eMerge Americas 2026, this conversation goes inside the decisions behind Sibyl. I ask Melissa what "clinically grounded" means beyond the marketing language, how she approaches sensitive data, and where she draws the line between AI support and professional care.
If you've spotted a problem through your own life experience but aren't sure you're qualified to build a business around it, her founder story is worth hearing!
In this conversation
- How hundreds of conversations with women and care providers helped shape the product
- Why Sibyl draws on a knowledge library developed with doctors and psychologists
- How Melissa is designing boundaries that encourage users to take breaks from the app
- The differences she's noticed between building a company in the Netherlands and the U.S.
About Melissa
Melissa Ablett-Jordaan is the founder of Sibyl and former Chief Operating Officer of Cambridge Innovation Center, where she helped grow the team from 50 to 300 people. An American based in the Netherlands, she had experience scaling companies but had never worked with AI before starting Sibyl.
Explore Sibyl:
https://www.sibyl.care/
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How I AI is now The AI Movement with Brooke.
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What data has shown is if you have time limits on how much someone can engage with something like a chat bot, it's so much healthier. So if it's 45 minutes and Sybil says, you know, hey, we've been chatting for a while, how about you go make a cup of tea or go for a walk? Like I think that's really going to help you. Putting in those moments to break it up is another real way that you can help draw that boundary and pull people back to, oh yeah, this is a piece of technology on my phone. This isn't something I should be talking to for six hours.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the AI Movement Podcast. The space where modern entrepreneurs and founders come to stay current and navigate their next move with AI together. I cover the conferences, sit with the people leading this shift, and I bring it all here. Broken down, without the hype, whether you're building something, pivoting your work, or trying to keep ahead ethically, you are in the right place. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome back. This week's featured conversation was recorded live at Emerge America's with Melissa Ablett Jordan. Melissa is a longtime company builder who has worked across innovation, media, and entrepreneurship. After experiencing three pregnancy losses on the journey to having her two children, began building Sybil, an AI-native, clinically grounded digital care platform designed to support women through pregnancy loss. In our conversation, Melissa shares what it looks like to build AI for one of the most emotionally sensitive areas of women's health. From creating clinical guardrails and protecting deeply personal data to knowing when technology should step in and when someone needs professional care. We also talk about her leap from longtime company builder to first-time founder. What can we learn building an AI company without coming from an AI background? And why lived experience can be such a powerful starting point for entrepreneurship? Highlighting these important conversations is one of the main reasons why I love having this podcast platform. This episode is for first-time AI founders, anyone building businesses from problems they've experienced firsthand. And those of you that are curious about how we can build technology with more care, trust, and intention during the AI movement. Let's dive into my conversation with Melissa. Melissa, I'm so excited to host you on the podcast today. Thanks. And we are here at Emerge Expo for the second day. You have a panel that happened already, and I'm so excited to talk about all your work at Sybil as a first-time founder, a first-time female founder, something I'm very uh lit up by and amplifying stories like yours. So for those that may not know yet, could you share first a bit about yourself? Sure. And then also all the work you're up to at Sybil.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great. Well, I define myself as a company builder. I've just kind of always been this person who's drawn to hard problems and then trying to figure out okay, how do we do this? How do we build people around or organize people around it to get it done? Yeah. So I started working in innovation policy in Massachusetts. Um, I then helped grow a small media startup, digital media startup, that ended up going from seed stage through acquisition. Then I joined a company and helped that company scale the Cambridge Innovation Center from 50 people to 300. And I was in the COO role in that company, which was amazing, and in many ways I thought was my dream job. But in the background, I was dealing with a really challenging situation, which is that I on the journey to my now two children, I had three pregnancy losses. And I really just experienced firsthand how little we do to support women in that space, and was shocked by it and really struggled with it. And so about a year and a half ago, I resigned from my COO role. I took a bit of a break, and then I started building Sybil. And so that's that's me in a nutshell.
SPEAKER_00Incredible. And for those that may not understand the power of Sybil and who it supports and what's your ideal client customer. Sure. Could you share a bit about that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so there's a really unique problem around pregnancy loss, which is that from a medical perspective, it's usually quite straightforward. So it's referred to as low acuity. Um, you know what's gonna happen in most cases it's not life-threatening. But from an emotional standpoint, it's really, really impactful. And what we know is that you know, 23 million miscarriages happen every year, and about one in five of those women is still struggling with mental health, sometimes up to two years later. Yeah. And so, and then what you hear from doctors and fertility clinics and midwives and therapists is God, we wish we had more we could provide with for women than just a pamphlet, a good luck, and you know, get back out there and start trying again. Right. So that's really the gap that we're building to fill and the problem we're trying to solve with Sybil. And Sybil is an AI-guided mental health and clinical information platform for women who are experiencing pregnancy loss. It's able to basically create a perfectly tailored, personalized, guided program for them to help them in the weeks after they experience a loss. And we're starting there because the need is most acute, but also planning to expand into supporting people going through infertility, pregnancy after loss, and then even things like birth trauma, postpartum anxiety, and postpartum depression.
SPEAKER_00So tell me all about creating an AI native platform for such a sensitive diaphragm. Yeah. How did you go about doing that? What were kind of like the boundaries you had in place of supporting people during this very emotional time?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So it's been a lot of experimentation and a lot of testing. And one of the things that I'm really blessed with in this space is so many women don't want future women to experience what they have, so they're so willing to test and help build products in this space. And there's so little being built in this space. So, you know, it was a lot of, we've right now we're using about four different models to perform different functions in the app, and we've tested a lot of different models to figure out what does what best. We're building our own safety guardrails, which have a number of layers to them, and those are things that I've built with psychologists, mental health professionals, but also folks who really specialize in AI to help us make sure, okay, this thing needs to be safe, needs to know where the boundaries are, we need to protect people when they might be at risk of self-harm or harm to others. And then, you know, the last thing is we're really hoping soon to potentially even build our own SLM and switch to using our own model. And so what's also really exciting is this is a space where there's not much data and there's not much that's that's built for it, purpose built. And so also the opportunity to build a really small niche SLM that is super duper intelligent when it comes to supporting people through reproductive mental health struggles and women's health is something we're really excited about.
SPEAKER_00That's so exciting. Yeah. Um so as I was doing my research for your company, one of the questions that came up was you use the term clinically grounded. Yeah. And as someone with a marketing background, how did you come up with the term clinically grounded? Is it just marketing copy? Go deeper on that.
SPEAKER_01So every Sybil is built such that if you ask it a medical question or a mental health question that is not coming from the generic world of what's in an LLM, that's coming from our own knowledge library. And that's all content that we've written with doctors and with psychologists specializing in this area.
SPEAKER_02Beautiful.
SPEAKER_01So that's something we're really committed to. And what that enables us to do as well is we're about to start pilots with a gynecology clinic and a midwife with multiple locations, and they feel safe telling their patients, hey, here's a platform that you can use that can support you through the coming days, weeks, months, maybe even years, because they know they can trust the answers that are in it. I have a dream of, you know, we're we're planning to stay in the well-being category for now, but I think there are really interesting applications of being able to diagnose complex grief, diagnose PTSD, diagnose anxiety and depression, which are all things we know women suffer after this experience. So there could be a universe where our strategically, after we've built and tested and learned enough that we decide, okay, let's pursue FDA clearance and let's really go clinical and see if we could be a digital medical device in that capacity. Ooh, exciting. Yeah. Hard work and expensive.
SPEAKER_00My next question for you, because I'm sure a lot of people are thinking about this, because this is a very personal matter. How are you protecting the security and privacy of your clients?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I am blessed in that my brother is a chief information security officer. Right. I can go to him with anything, and he's been he's been helping on that. Um the other nice thing is, so I'm based, I'm American, but based over in the Netherlands. And we plan to, you know, from day one really operate in the EU and the US, which means we're, since we're building in the EU, we're being held to the GDPR privacy standards, which is a bit tighter than you might experience in in some other geographies. But it's also something that we're just, you know, trying to be really thoughtful about from day one, really ethically and consensually collecting data, being super clear with our users where it's going and what it's being used for, and if they opt out, they opt out. Um, building with those safety procedures in place from the start. We'll certainly also be thinking about HIPAA as we go down the line. Because as you're getting to with this question, if you don't have trust around this, it's a really scary thing for someone to be sharing this type of stuff with a digital platform.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. My favorite thing about this podcast, because I always draw such an international mix of guests, please share what your experience has been like living in the Netherlands and your peers there. How are they integrating and adopting AI? What differences have you noticed between the Netherlands and maybe someplace like the United States? Sure. I mean, that could be like a whole separate.
SPEAKER_01And it's it's so fascinating. Um so in the Netherlands, the culture around entrepreneurship, but there's a statistic that Dutch entrepreneurs raise like one-fifth of the capital of their American counterparts. Wow. So much, much less venture capital. People rely much more on bootstrapping and revenue, and so far fewer founders raise wild rounds of investment. Whereas here in the United States, it's you can't bootstrap in a lot of cases because you would be going too slow with the competition around you to then actually compete. So that's one key difference that I really see just around entrepreneurship in general. Um, it's also different because the Dutch economic system is not set up to reward extreme wealth. Whereas the United States system is set up of, you know, from taxes, from incentives, everything is in that capacity. So you see a difference too in ambitions where Dutch founders tend to have much smaller ambitions, American founders much bigger, and there's also market size and all those things. Specifically around AI, you know, I wouldn't say I see too much of a difference. I think sometimes I see more of a focus in Europe on, you know, what's ethical concerns about how AI and data is being used in certain industries like defense, etc. Um, so I think that's a little bit, you hear that more on the European side of the ocean than you do over here.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for sharing a bit about the Dutch. You know, I've had uh so many different guests on the podcast, and I'm always so fascinated how different cultures approach entrepreneurialism and touching a little bit more about as a first-time founder yourself, and you just chatted about bootstrapping. If you don't mind sharing a little bit about your founder's journey and what you've learned kind of high level along the way, you can even touch on the research, the MVP, fundraising, anything that would help someone, especially in the AI and tech space.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, so I think, you know, the first was kind of my mindset, and I think I probably had the mindset that I think is more common sometimes around females than males, which was kind of like, oh, I I can't do that, I don't have a crazy idea, I don't have a big idea. And I was really used to being kind of the COO role where I was the person executing another visionary's idea. Yeah. Um, and then when the idea for Sybil came, I just fell so in love with it that like my husband owns his own business, and he was we were sitting on the couch one night, and he's like, Yeah, it's like you've fallen in love. Like you can't possibly think about doing anything else. And I was like, Yes, that's exactly it. Like, I I wake up and I'm thinking about Sybil, I go to bed and I'm thinking about Cybil. Like, even if you told me it was a bad idea, I would still want to do it. Like, I can't stop myself. And he's like, Yep, that's that's how you know. And then again, I had I had skilled businesses, but I had never worked with AI, so I actually did a mini accelerator program uh with a nonprofit in the Netherlands that specifically helped support women entrepreneurs in AI, which was great, called AI for all. And then I was doing a lot of customer validation, hundreds of conversations with women who experienced loss, but also with OBGYNs, midwives, and and and therapists, built a prototype, tested that, then did we just did our closed beta, and we're now about to do pilots in our open beta. And then along the way, managed to find a CFO who's based in Boston, who's been a huge, huge help. Her name is Catherine Chan, attracted some other people, built a great advisory board, raised a little bit of pre-seed funding. Um, and now we're just, you know, trying to go as quickly as we can to get this out into the world and as many people using it as possible.
SPEAKER_00That's exciting. I wish you so much success because I even have a few women in mind I want to share this with.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Maybe for like collaboration and and brands, partnerships. Do you work in that area at all?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're starting to explore that because really again, it's about trust and it's about reaching women in this very specific moment. And so there's certainly really great voices online, and people, what I love so much now about a kind of moment that we're in is you see women sharing their experiences on social media in a way they haven't before. And I think we're really excited to partner with some of those voices. There's really brilliant nonprofits. I think women are generally, and men are generally waking up to say, like, hey, there's things that women go through from a health perspective that are just not okay. How do we fix that? And so partnering with organizations and individuals who are passionate about that is definitely part of the plan. Beautiful.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. My next question for you is where do you draw that line and that boundary of what an AI-assisted companion can support someone versus needing to send someone the direction of an actual human for care? Yeah. A big part of that we build with professionals.
SPEAKER_01So we build with mental health professionals to say, where would you draw this line? Where would you say, okay, we we need someone to come in versus this is something they can manage on their own. So the technical term for that is in the infrastructure of Sybil, we've built distress tiers. So we're able to tier our users of, okay, you know, this is normal, you're having a really bad, you know, few months, but everything's gonna be okay, up to, okay, this is concerning and you need professional help. And the behavior of the app changes effectively based on that. Wow. The other thing is I think a big problem with Gen AI and the large companies is they're maximizing for engagement. It's Chat GPT being that annoying voice always like, and can I do this for you? And can I do this for you? And you just want it to stop. So another thing we're really working on, and what data has shown is if you have time limits on how much someone can engage with something like a chat bot, it's so much healthier. So if it's 45 minutes and Sybil says, you know, hey, we've been chatting for a while, how about you go make a cup of tea or go for a walk or go listen to your favorite song? Like I think that's really gonna help you. Putting in those moments to break it up is another real way that you can help draw that boundary and pull people back to, oh yeah, this is a piece of technology on my phone. This isn't something I should be talking to for six hours.
SPEAKER_00Wow, I like that. And I I've heard that Claude does those check-ins a little bit more than Chat GPT.
SPEAKER_01I find that Claude is better.
SPEAKER_00A friend of mine did this really cool challenge where she vibe coded 30 apps in 30 days for January.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_00And she, of course, found herself staying up late at night, you know, outside of her already nine to five doing this project. And she said that Claude would sometimes be like, you need to go to bed. I was like, girl, stop, go to sleep. And I appreciate that. Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01So much better.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And what you see in AI induced psychosis is indeed it's it's frequently someone's been engaging with this for hours and hours and hours. So like that's just such a simple way. If you're not just monetize trying to monetize tokens, you can do that.
SPEAKER_00My next question for you, since you were at that point where you're scaling. Yes. How do you continue to get support and remain trustworthy? Scale an app like Sybil.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, what I think for brands in general is in these early stages, obviously, as a founder, you're touching everything. Every Google ad we're running, every piece of outreach. And right now I am kind of the voice and that internal. I think usually as a founder, you have a pretty good sense of like, okay, this is where I want it to be, or this feels off. And then it becomes, you know, finding people to join your team who can replicate that, and then what are the the tools and the guidelines and things you can demonstrate or you can build to help scale that as you grow. And then I think for us, another really important piece. So, what we would love to have happen, of course, is that doctors are are sharing Sybil and other people who are at the moment of supporting women through pregnancy loss, and that is a huge piece of trust if someone's receiving this in the that capacity. So getting that right will be a really big part of making sure that the the way in which Sybil is initially introduced to someone feels really pure and right for what we're doing.
SPEAKER_00And just from experience of using like menstrual trackers, a lot of that information has been sold to third parties. Can you touch on that nature? And I assume you don't do any of that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, we do not. And what we commit to our users is that we would never sell their data for advertising or marketing, and we're really up front of in explaining, we'd love to use your data to train an SLM. We'd love to use your data to actually help pharmaceutical companies make drugs for managing pregnancy loss and other things that women go through better. We'd love to use your data for all of these things. So, like, tell us if you're cool with that, and if so, yes. We would not have a situation. I think yeah, there was a very large period tracking app that got in quite a bit of trouble for how they had sold data unethically, and we're really committed to informed consent from everyone. And this is again just such sensitive data that to do that would be so deeply unethical that it's really working hard to make sure we never fall in that category. Okay, that's good to hear. Would you like to share maybe any case studies? Sure. We we only ever look at the chats from our users completely anonymized and aggregated, so we're never able to tie back someone's identity. And our our testers so far know that again this is happening, we're very upfront about that. Yes. But you know, you hear stories from users who one woman was, she found out in her uh third month of pregnancy that the fetus had severe medical issues and wasn't likely to survive after birth. And she really leveraged Sybil to just kind of process that and have tailored information because an experience you also hear very frequently from women going through pregnancy loss is just the act of going online and trying to find the information you need can be really triggering because it can be a lot of information that's actually not applicable to you. And you know, as someone who's going through their first pregnancy loss, hearing the story of someone going through her eighth can can be really difficult if that's what you find on the Google rabbit hole. We hear case studies from users that Sybil was able to meet them at a moment and provide such tailored, personalized guidance and support that it was really helpful. Um I have heard just other women as well that they just wish they had found the sooner and that it existed.
SPEAKER_00Well, keep up the amazing work, it's such important work that you're doing. Thank you. And I really hope a year from now that we are just blowing it out of the water with brand partnerships and everybody knows about Civil, and I'm excited to watch you grow. Thank you. And I just want to give you the opportunity for one major key takeaway you want listeners to leave with. We can even gear this towards first-time founders or females, whatever's on your heart.
SPEAKER_01I think I really encourage women if you have gone through an experience that you know it took me going through this experience of pregnancy loss to say, to really understand how broken this part of care and this system was. And so I think for so many women, they think, oh, I couldn't build a business around this, even though they've lived an experience and lived a problem. And the strongest founders are those who have lived the problem. Of course, you need to find people who have expertise to join you and fill the gaps where you might not be strong, but don't underestimate what living the problem means if you want to build a business there.
SPEAKER_00And if women, is it are men able to use the app?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so we want to eventually provide partner support because there's so there's little for women and there's nothing for men in this journey. And I regularly ask my husband, what would you have wanted? What would have helped you? Yeah. So that's definitely, we're starting with a focus on women, but hope to expand certainly in the near future to support men as well.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so men or women, how can they find out about Sybil?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, visit our website, which is Sybil.care. We're on Instagram, TikTok, etc. I'm loud and obnoxious on LinkedIn, so you'll find me there. Um, yeah, and that you know, just ask anyone if you know someone going through loss and you think that they could use support and that they're willing to try out something. We appreciate everyone sharing the word about Cybil and getting it out there.
SPEAKER_00Of course, and I'll add all that in the show notes as well. Great. Thank you so much for your time, Melissa. It was so much fun to chat with you. Thank you, likewise. That's a wrap on this episode of the AI Movement Podcast. If this conversation sparked something for you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you're loving the show, a rating or review means everything. It helps more founders and career pivoters find their way here. Want to partner with us or bring the AI movement to your next event? Reach out. I'd love to connect. Until next time, stay curious, keep adapting, and move accordingly. If you're tuning into this podcast, you're most likely an AI advocate. And you may have also wondered how to support your body against the invisible stress of EMFs. Think Wi-Fi, cell towers, or hours in front of your laptop. Leela Quantum products are lab-tested and triple blind studies and are proven to help harmonize and neutralize EMF signals. Their products are the few things I felt a real energetic shift from, and I personally wear their quantum energy necklace daily. And if you're someone who cares about optimizing your energy and nervous system like I do, you can explore their offers with my affiliate link in the show notes below.
