To date, we've raised just under $500,000 from our community — investments ranging from $100 to $100,000.

We are now raising an additional $1.5 million to continue building deliberately, responsibly, and in public.

But this isn't really a fundraising announcement.

It's a statement of intent.

When GPT Arrived, Something Felt Off

Almost four years ago, when GPT first arrived, something troubled us deeply.

All of humanity began prompting a machine.

No one was prompting us.

The conversation moved fast — too fast. Faster than ethics. Faster than reflection. Faster than questions about second-order consequences.

And we watched a familiar industry pattern emerge.

A narrative manufactured to buy market share first and monetize people later.

Speed over substance.

Scale over responsibility.

Growth first. Meaning later.

In many cases, the result wasn't innovation.

It was essentially a financial scheme.

Why We Founded Curiouser.AI

We didn't start Curiouser.AI to build a faster autocomplete.

We started it around two simple beliefs:

• AI should make you better, not just faster.

• Technology should create jobs, not quietly erase them.

That framing immediately put us at odds with much of the market.

And we were okay with that.

Why We Charged for the Trial

A little over six months ago, we launched our first MVP — an AI named Alice.

From day one, we made an unusual decision.

We charged for the trial.

$5 for two weeks.

It transforms users into participants.

Customers into collaborators.

We could have followed the standard playbook:

• Raise a massive round

• Spend aggressively to capture share

• Harvest data later

We chose not to.

Instead, we built with the people using the product.

People invested just enough to care.

Enough to give feedback.

Enough to shape what they were building alongside us.

That process is how Alice 2.0 was created.

And it launches at the end of this month.

Who Alice 2.0 Is For

Alice 2.0 is designed for people who work for themselves.

Builders.

Independent professionals.

Creators.

Entrepreneurs.

People building businesses and communities — often on platforms like LinkedIn — without the safety net of institutions.

By next year, more than half of all Americans will be working independently.

Yet most AI tools were designed for corporations, not individuals.

We decided to reverse that equation.

What We've Proven So Far

Without a free tier.

Without paid acquisition.

Without hype.

Here's the data:

• Hundreds of paying customers (by design, no free tier)

• 60% trial-to-paid conversion (vs. a 2–3% industry average)

• Zero customer acquisition cost — entirely organic

• 0 to 70,000 followers on LinkedIn in under a year

• Cash-flow positive

• A majority-women team of 12

We've also filed SEC Form C, and the company has been fully audited.

Transparency isn't a slogan for us.

It's infrastructure.

Trust Is the Product

We believe trust is not a marketing tactic.

It's a system.

It's what allows people to build companies, communities, and careers without fear of being exploited by the very tools meant to help them.

We are doing our best to build the kind of company we would want to work for, and the kind of products that genuinely contribute to society rather than quietly extracting from it.

Yes, we want to create wealth.

For our customers.

For our investors.

For our team.

We are capitalists.

But we want to do it in a way we can all be proud of.

Because the real risk of technology isn't that it moves too slowly.

It's that it spreads darkness at the speed of light.

"The trick with technology is to avoid spreading darkness at the speed of light."

Stephen Klein has spent 30 years in Silicon Valley, raised $100 million in venture capital, built a company that became a Harvard Business School case study, and teaches AI Ethics and Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. To learn more about Curiouser.AI or to sign up, visit curiouser.ai. Curiouser is community-funded on WeFunder.