Pickmybrain, a Tallinn-based startup building AI-powered Digital Brains for celebrities, experts, and public figures, has raised a €1.8 million ($2.1 million) pre-Seed round to grow its team, scale into new markets, and enhance the product.
The funding was secured from a group of business angels, such as Garri Zmudze (a longevity and BioTech investor and early investor in Insilico Medicine), as well as Raison.app, and non-public investors.
Sergei Verbitski, founder of Pickmybrain, “While AI is often framed as a threat to jobs, it’s also creating new ways for professionals to share and monetise their expertise. There’s an emerging layer of personalisation: AI models built around a specific human’s knowledge, not just broad internet data. Just like Patreon helped creators monetise content, we are enabling professionals to monetise their expertise without becoming full-time content producers or mentors. Looking ahead, these Digital Brains will evolve into AI assistants that enhance workflows, maintain context over time, and act as persistent team members.”
Founded in 2022, Pickmybrain helps professionals, public figures, and domain experts turn their knowledge into AI-powered advisors offering practical, on-demand guidance. Users can ask these Digital Brains questions based on a particular expert’s insights, while more important questions are sent directly to the expert through 1:1 asynchronous video.
According to the company, professionals and public figures often find it difficult to share their expertise widely without dedicating all their time to repetitive questions or creating content. Meanwhile, AI personas are gaining widespread attention.
“Khaby Lame selling his AI twin for €840.5 million ($975 million) illustrates how digital likenesses and AI-driven personalities are becoming a cultural phenomenon. Pickmybrain sits at the intersection of these trends, providing a platform that lets experts turn their domain-specific knowledge into AI-powered Digital Brains, making their insights accessible and scalable so users can instantly tap into their trusted expertise, get practical answers instead of generic AI responses, and apply guidance from top professionals directly in both work and life,” the Estonian startup mentioned in the press release.
Pickmybrain works by training AI models on an expert’s structured knowledge, such as interviews, articles, books, and recorded responses. It notes that experts have full control over the content the AI is trained on: they upload their own media and consent to the LLM’s use of any third-party resources. This ensures each digital brain gathers distinctive personal insights, not merely scraped data. For individuals with limited digital footprints, Pickmybrain provides tools to record thoughts, which the AI then utilises to learn.
The company aims to shift from the ad-driven creator economy to the expert economy. It highlights that it provides a transactional, utility-focused alternative for monetising expertise without depending on ads, followers, or constant content creation, thus directly challenging attention-based models dominated by Big Tech. Professionals can now scale their knowledge like content creators scale views, but without the viral content treadmill, it notes.
The platform now includes more than 1,000 professionals from various fields such as sports, entertainment, and business. Notable members include Peter Vesterbacka, co-founder of Rovio and founder of Slush; World Cup champion Paul Pogba; and Bozoma Saint John, who has served as CMO at Netflix, CBO at Uber, and Head of Marketing at Apple Music and Pepsi.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/04/tallinn-based-pickmybrain-raises-e1-8-million-to-build-ai-powered-digital-brains-for-experts-and-celebrities/
