Ollie is betting its focus on privacy can help it win the AI assistant race

For an AI assistant to become truly useful, it first has to know a lot about you. Ollie, a personal assistant for everyday life, is betting that doesn’t mean you have to hand over all your data and sacrifice your privacy in the process.

While some enterprise-focused AI assistants have data privacy protections in place, Ollie is among the first mainstream, family-focused AI to achieve SOC 2 compliance — a framework that allows a company to demonstrate, through an independent audit, that it has formal controls in place to protect customer data and operate its systems securely. Achieving this was an important milestone for Ollie’s team, as it signals to potential users that the assistant isn’t trying to scoop up your personal data for other purposes, like AI training. “We fundamentally think that trust and privacy are absolutely imperative, and that’s why our business model is a subscription, because we want our users to know that Ollie works for you,” explained Ollie co-founder and CEO Bill Lennon in an interview with TechCrunch. “We’re not sharing your data with anyone,” he stressed. There are many personal AI assistants positioning themselves as consumer-friendly solutions focused on integrating with users’ daily lives via text messages, which is why Ollie’s privacy angle could prove a significant differentiator. Today, Ollie competes with other existing text-based assistants like Poke (acquired by Cognition), Fambot, Ohai, Folk, Saner.ai, and Tomo. There are also a number of assistants focused more on work, calendar management and email, like Town, Lindy and Reclaim.ai. And of course, there’s Instinct, the AI assistant that just landed $350 million in funding at a $2.5 billion valuation before it even launched. To say the space is heating up is putting it mildly, in other words. By comparison, San Diego-based Ollie has raised a much more modest $7.5 million seed round, largely from Khosla Ventures, along with AI House. Lennon is taking a different approach with Ollie. Currently, this family assistant connects to calendars and email to organize family schedules and keep its users updated about their days. It also offers tools that can help you plan meals, shop for groceries, track to-dos, book appointments, and pay bills via group chats. Later, it may help manage household budgets, too. Yet, all this access requires trust, which Ollie claims, is its value-add compared to its rivals.