Pickmybrain raises $2.1M to turn experts into AI digital brains

Pickmybrain, a startup building AI-powered Digital Brains for celebrities, experts, and public figures, has raised a $2.1 million pre-seed round from a group of business angels. The funding will help grow the team, scale into new markets, and enhance the product.

Professionals and public figures often struggle to share their expertise at scale without spending all their time on repetitive questions or content creation. At the same time, AI personas are capturing mainstream attention. Khaby Lame selling his AI twin for $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.

Pickmybrain works by training AI models on an expert’s structured knowledge, such as interviews, articles, books, and recorded responses. Experts have full control over the content that the AI is trained on: they upload their own media and consent to the LLM’s use of any third-party resources. This means that each digital brain captures unique personal insights, not just scraped data. For those without large digital footprints, Pickmybrain offers tools to record thoughts that the AI then uses to learn.

Routine questions are handled by AI, while high-value or personal queries go directly to the expert via 1:1 asynchronous video, allowing knowledge to scale without losing the human touch, something no other platform offers today. The platform currently hosts over 1,000 professionals across sports, entertainment, and business, including Peter Vesterbacka (Rovio co-founder and Slush founder), World Cup winner Paul Pogba, and Bozoma Saint John (former CMO at Netflix, CBO at Uber, and Head of Marketing at Apple Music and Pepsi).

“While AI is often framed as a threat to jobs, it’s also creating new ways for professionals to share and monetise their expertise,” said Sergei Verbitski, Founder of Pickmybrain, a serial entrepreneur with four exits and $400 million in combined revenue across AdTech, trading, iGaming, and digital marketing. “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.”

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Pickmybrain shifts the model from the ad-driven creator economy to the expert economy. It directly challenges attention-based models dominated by Big Tech by offering a transactional, utility-first alternative for monetising expertise without relying on ads, followers, or constant content production. Professionals can now scale their knowledge like content creators scale views, but without the viral content treadmill.