Park City entrepreneur launches AI ‘digital twin’ with $15M in funding

Park City entrepreneur Frank Addante, founder and CEO of Hello Haven, has launched the AI company with $15 million in pre-seed funding. Haven is designed as a personal AI “digital twin” that learns a user’s preferences, routines, and decisions. Photo: Hello Haven

Frank Addante’s Hello Haven is designed to learn users’ routines, preferences and decisions, then handle tasks on their behalf

PARK CITY, Utah — Frank Addante has built technology companies before, but this time he is doing it from Park City.

Addante, a longtime entrepreneur who previously founded the advertising technology company Rubicon Project, is launching his latest venture, Hello Haven, from Utah with $15 million in pre-seed funding.

The company’s product, Haven, is an artificial intelligence platform designed to learn a user’s routines, preferences and past decisions and eventually complete tasks on that person’s behalf.

For Addante, choosing Park City and Utah was deliberate.

“The draw to Utah isn’t just the amazing landscapes, the literal breath of fresh air and the variety of active things to do. It’s the incredibly smart and driven people,” Addante told TownLift.

At a previous company, Addante maintained a Utah office and said some of the strongest technologists and scientists he worked with were based here. He also pointed to the state’s Olympic history and the return of the Winter Games in 2034.

“I believe there is no better place in the country right now than Utah to build an innovative tech company that bridges humans and technology,” he said.

Addante co-founded Hello Haven with Duc Chau. The company publicly launched this month and announced $15 million in funding led by venture capital firm Mayfield.

The idea grew out of Addante’s own struggle to keep up with the volume of information and tasks in everyday life.

“I’m a dad, an entrepreneur, and I have ADHD,” he said. “My brain is constantly overloaded and overwhelmed.”

He wanted something that could remember context and take action, rather than answer questions.

“I needed a partner, almost like a virtual robot in my pocket, to help me,” Addante said. “Not replace me, but empower me.”

Haven is designed to build a private, personalized memory of each user, learning relationships, routines, preferences, and previous decisions over time. The company says the system can organize email, send follow-ups, process returns, place orders, make phone calls, and create reminders.

Addante said about 30% of interactions with Haven are already autonomous, meaning users have instructed the system to complete tasks while they are doing something else.

The company says users interacted with Haven more than 2 million times during its private beta.

The level of personalization also raises questions about privacy and how much information users are willing to entrust to an AI system.

Addante said Haven was designed around the idea that personalization and privacy do not have to conflict.

“Your data is your data,” he said, adding that the company does not sell user data or use it to train models for other users.

Addante said he expects the technology to become increasingly capable of handling everyday tasks, from shopping and returns to reservations and scheduling.

“A year from now, I think Haven will be your trusted go-to assistant to buy things, return things, book things, do things,” he said.

For Addante, building an AI company also feels different from his earlier ventures because of how quickly the technology is changing.

“Today, innovation happens at the speed of thought,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The challenge, he said, is knowing what not to build.

“Focus is critical, and more important than ever before,” Addante said. “Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.”