By Riley Kaminer
“Hey Siri, do you have a mommy?” Those were the first words Emil Jimenez’s four-year-old daughter uttered during one of her first interactions with an iPad, in January 2020.
After spending a few minutes asking Siri a litany of questions like whether she likes ice cream and what her favorite toys are, Jimenez’s daughter was hooked.
“Siri, I love you,” she said. “You’re my best friend.”
This was a lightbulb moment for Jimenez. “I started thinking about what her world will be like when she’s my age and how technology is evolving,” he shared with Refresh Miami.
That got Jimenez, a longtime marketing executive and creative, to start thinking more deeply about what exactly Siri is – and what its future iterations could become. “I thought to myself, ‘I can build an interface that queries my mind and queries my stories.’”
A logical line of thinking coming from this point is immortality, or living forever through data. But for Jimenez, this idea morphed into something even more urgent, more immediately useful: “How can I use this data to grow as a person, right? How can I build on this digital twin concept and create the dashboards and data that allow us to optimize ourselves.”
And so, later in 2020, MindBank AI was born. The Miami-based company is building AI digital twins composed of, in Jimenez’s words, “dashboards of the mind.”
To understand what exactly that means, it’s useful to look at the example of therapy. It can take months to even secure a therapy appointment, if you even have access to it. Once you start therapy, your practitioner will take time to fully understand your past experiences and your needs.
This is where MindBank can come in. You as the patient could share your MindBank digital twin with the practitioner, enabling them to get the context they need to best serve you. They then also have a dashboard that can show them your ups and downs, what makes you happy or sad – and get an idea of how to improve your wellbeing, Jimenez said.
It is based on this vision that MindBank was awarded a $1.2 million SBIR Phase I contract to develop a remote patient monitoring dashboard for the Air Force. Just two days after the official project kick-off, Jimenez is already excited about the prospects. “The reaction to our technology is crazy,” he said, citing a mixture of amazement and slight apprehension towards the unknown.
“Now it’s all about getting the funding we need to speed up development,” he said. Sales is also a major focus for Jimenez and his 10-person team. Consumer users have proven a strong pipeline to B2B sales, and the government sector is also clearly interested. Jimenez said he is particularly interested in doubling down on the healthcare space, where there is much need. He hopes that, in the short term, a successful project with the military will validate MindBank’s platform.
Long term though, Jimenez’s vision is literally out of this world. He wants to digitize humanity to the extent that MindBank can “add value to humanity on another planet.”
And Jimenez’s head isn’t just in the clouds, as the U.S. Space Force is housed within the Air Force, where MindBank already has a foot in the door.
“My measurement of success is when this technology is on another planet,” asserted Jimenez. “That’s when we’ve achieved something remarkable.”
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