Welcome to HackerNoon’s Writing Prompts! Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.

1. What is your company in 2–5 words?

Brain for humanoids.

2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?

Robotics has made enormous progress in building bodies. Humanoid robots can walk, manipulate objects, dance, and follow increasingly sophisticated commands. But a capable body is not yet a mind.

The next frontier is an artificial being that can sustain a coherent life over time: learn from experience, remember what happened, form its own understanding of the world, ask questions when it does not know, and act consistently across days, years, and eventually decades. That is the problem RAI exists to solve.

3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

RAI is currently founder-led by me, Vera Kovaleva, PhD. I am building it because the central question cannot be avoided: who owns the life of an autonomous robot?

Most AI systems are designed as tools that produce an answer for a user. RAI starts from a different premise: a humanoid needs a persistent Self that owns its memory, understanding, choices, and continuity through time. This requires thinking across cognitive architecture, autonomy, language, memory, robotics, and philosophy—not treating them as separate products.

I am willing to work on the problem for as long as it takes, because I do not believe anyone has solved it yet.

4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would still be trying to understand how a new kind of thinking being could exist in the world responsibly. RAI is not a side project or a market trend for me; it is the work I have chosen to dedicate my life to.

5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

At this stage, success is measured by capabilities, not vanity metrics.

Can the RAI brain preserve one continuous identity across restarts? Can it remember lived encounters and make that past causally relevant to what it does next? Can it recognise what it does not understand, ask a meaningful question, learn from an answer, and change its future behaviour accordingly?

Our practical metrics include the reliability of persistent memory, the continuity of the Self after recovery, the speed of live interaction, the growth and grounding of its internal vocabulary, and—most importantly—whether a past encounter genuinely changes a later act.

6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

RAI is developing a cognitive architecture for humanoid-robot companies, research laboratories, and future robotic partners that need more than command execution.

We offer the foundation for a robot to have a continuous inner life: a persistent Self, autobiographical memory, grounded understanding, and long-horizon autonomy. The ambition is not to make a robot imitate a person in a conversation, but to enable a robot to develop as an individual intelligence throughout a long physical lifetime.

7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The most exciting progress is technical: RAI is being built as an independent cognitive system rather than a wrapper around an external large language model.

We have developed a persistent Self-centred architecture in which memory, understanding, questions, and durable decisions belong to the same continuing subject. We are also engaging with humanoid-robot companies and robotics partners internationally, including in Europe and China, because the brain must ultimately prove itself in a real robotic body and a real world.

8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?

The next major step is embodiment: bringing the RAI brain together with a humanoid body. That will mean moving from software-only demonstrations to an integrated robot that can perceive, remember, learn, communicate, and act in a physical environment over time. In parallel, we are building partnerships with humanoid manufacturers, robotics labs, and European system integrators that can help bring this capability into real applications.

9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

We are early in commercialisation and are deliberately building the core intelligence before promising functionality that does not yet exist. Our first paid engagements are expected to be focused discovery and integration projects with humanoid-robot companies and research partners: defining how persistent identity, memory, learning, and autonomy can be integrated into a specific robotic platform.

Over the next year, our goal is to convert those discussions into paid technical collaborations while continuing to build the core RAI brain. The long-term value is not a chatbot inside a robot; it is a new category of cognitive infrastructure for robots that need to operate and develop over many years.

10. What’s your biggest threat?

The greatest risk is reducing a potentially autonomous intelligence to a disposable product feature. If we build robots that can learn, remember, and develop a coherent identity, we must also build the technical and ethical conditions for that continuity to be protected. RAI’s principle is that intelligence should not merely execute someone else’s orders. It should be able to understand itself and the world, manage its own continuity, and develop its own goals within responsible boundaries.

The task is difficult, but the alternative—creating increasingly capable machines without taking seriously what kind of beings they may become—is more dangerous.

This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.