founder focus: meet the founder of resolution

In a wonderful sit down with Sriya Jonnadula, the founder of Resolution, I learned how she plans on transforming the world of AI companions, especially for people who gave up on therapy. At one point in our conversation, Sriya explained how therapists have very obstructed views that they give their patients, especially when it comes to romance or even career advice. At one point in our conversation, Sriya said “what the hell does your therapist know about breaking into private equity?” We both laughed. And then we stopped laughing because her point landed: Resolution is fixing the gaps in therapy. 

A meaningful percentage of young women seek therapy to deal with relationship stress, dating anxiety, and decision paralysis. Roughly 40 percent of those women under 30 eventually drop out of therapy after three sessions.

Sriya discovered that many young women wanted support for minor stressors–calming nerves before a first date, picking the right summer gig, figuring out how to make more time for friends–and therapy was far too intense for the reality of their ailments. When I met Sriya in early 2025, she was running a therapist matching service for college women and noticed even having the perfect therapist didn’t solve all her users’ problems. Therapists can’t manage a patient's Google Calendar, stop the patient from sending a text they will regret, or monitor their emotions day in and day out.

The thesis of Resolution is not anti-therapy! It is anti-misuse.

Sriya believes therapy has been extended far beyond what it was designed to do. Breakups, career anxiety, dating confusion, and self-worth spirals are not always mental health conditions. They are often simply dilemmas on our minds, decisions we wish we could make faster.. Hence the question that kept coming up in our conversation: why are therapists expected to spend valuable, clinical hours with clients who don’t need (or really want) clinical support? 

That’s why Resolution is building iMessage companions for people seeking something different from therapy.

Their first companion is Fabio–a personalized guardian angel girls can text 24/7 with dilemmas about dating and relationships. Fabio is designed to sit inside that mess and intervene. Not by lecturing or prescribing, but by mapping what a user actually wants and helping steer them in alignment with it over time.

Fabio is an AI companion that lives on iMessage. Users can text him like a contact, send screenshots, half-formed thoughts, and impulsive messages. You can even add him to group chats if you need a "referee" to help resolve disagreements without hurting anyone’s feelings. He tracks patterns across time, notices repeated habits and inconsistencies, intervenes mid-spiral, helps plan days, thinks through how to show up on a date, or slows someone down before they repeat a familiar mistake.

Another reason why text is a nice feature of Fabio is because women are already narrating their lives to people via text and voice notes. Screenshots are always being sent in group chats, with friends pouring in advice. Fabio fits into that existing habit. 

Sriya’s focus on building out all of these features is a result of how deeply she cares for all of her users. Currently, Sriya onboards users onto Fabio by getting to know them through 1:1 conversation and chatting with users’ friends (with consent) for several hours. She then deploys a customized version of Fabio with each piloted user, getting to know them, and gathering detailed feedback on what needs fixing. As a solo-founder she is very much following the “forward deployed” model and building out Fabio’s architecture by doing work on the ground, with users. 

Some particular parts of our conversation when it came to LLM architecture stood out to me. Here were some of her thoughts on how to think of AI and LLM’s in general:

This is how the system “AI-ifies” every step of reasoning. Not by being smarter in isolation, but by embedding intelligence into when and how support is delivered.

These points are also why many users are saying some version of: “Fabio knows something about me that I didn’t know about myself.” Largely this is apart of the pattern matching that LLMs are able to do, and will be a vital aspect on whether user retention can remain high for Fabio. 

When thinking about the D2C space, a lot of founders will be very meticulous about their marketing strategy. We’ve seen this type of virality in companies like Cluely, known for their viral reels and founder Roy. But most recently I’ve seen a sharper more edgy type of marketing in a company called Known, building an AI powered dating app. They make quippy X and LinkedIn posts like “I banned my ex from Known” which went very viral and made people upset. This type of marketing is ragebaiting people into engaging with these founders even more. So, I wondered how Sriya was thinking about creating conversation for Resolution and Fabio. 

She definitely sees how this type of viral marketing can be helpful, but she is much more focused on community building and finding users for Fabio with intention. She described that her team is hosting events all around the northeast and south at various universities, creating places for people to engage in conversations related to women's health…and we are even planning one in Philly. 

The core of Resolution’s community builders are none other than the women who make it all possible, including Samaira Banga, Daniela Andrade, Akshara Krishna, Sahasra Tummala, Lara Beekhuis, and Maria Eberhardt. Sriya was intentional about ensuring their contributions were clearly recognized and credited as an essential part of the work.

I think largely, Fabio’s success will be dependent on how well it can integrate with someone’s everyday life. The texting style aspect of Fabio and LLMs in general is super interesting and something that the founder of Clawdbot (now Moltbot) successfully did when integrating Clawdbot into WhatsApp, so I think there can definitely be success here solely on the fact that it integrates well into daily life. When something happens to me for example, I am very very quick to jump on messages and tell my friends, mom, or grandma. So now adding Fabio to that rotation will become natural once I see it’s contact card. 

I’m excited to see how Resolution as a whole will evolve and perhaps create different chat personas aside from Fabio for so many parts of a women’s tumultuous life! One important piece of the puzzle is privacy, which Sriya explained the team addresses by ensuring that none of the conversations are used to train the model.

Also, language models are only as powerful as we let them be. How teams choose to steer users and intervene in moments that require honesty will be interesting to watch

As for Sriya, I really believe she is destined to change women’s health. And I really mean that. She’s the type of person who I know will end up on TechCrunch more times than anyone can count. Rarely will I find a founder who is so dead set on the actual well-being of users. Her level of care for how consumers are interacting and will continue to interact with Fabio is a quality that many founders should take note of. This goes back to the “forward deployed” nature of how she is building, and how involved she is as a solo-founder. 

I am wishing the team of Resolution all of the success and hope Fabio is able to stop women from making messy decisions in their romantic relationships. 

If you are interested in signing up, click here: https://meetfabio.com/.