Ever wondered what technology and AI would look like if it were built by a mom?

One designed not around engagement metrics, algorithms or ad revenue — but around the actual complications and nuances of family life. The 11pm mental checklist. The 14 school apps. The invisible labour that never makes it onto a CV, but runs the entire household.

Avni Patel Thompson, a mom and 3x founder, has spent a decade trying to build that version. And what she’s learned along the way should change how all of us think about technology, parenting, and what we actually need from both.

The Village Isn’t Gone. The Mechanism Is.

Avni’s work starts with a single insight: modern parents aren’t missing the will to build and participate in community. They’re missing the infrastructure.

“The village in the traditional sense is where you grew up and the people you’d known all your life. I was certain those people still exist in our communities. What we’re lacking is the mechanism to know them and trust them — over a shorter period of time.”- Avni

That gap — between the people who exist and the trust that connects them — is what she tried to solve first with Poppy, a vetted caregiver marketplace backed by Y Combinator, and then with Milo, an AI family co-pilot backed by OpenAI.

Both were different expressions of the same question: how do we give people the first-principles version of the village?

The Real Problem With Family Tech

Here’s something the industry doesn’t say out loud: most of the tools families use every day were never built for them.

“We haven’t looked at homes as their own domain. We use products built for work — to achieve productivity — and plug them into homes where the end objective is completely different. Families don’t live to be productive.”

The result? A market full of edtech sold to school boards instead of designed for kids. Productivity apps that treat the family like a project to manage. Platforms that add to the noise instead of filtering it.

3 things the parenting-tech world still gets wrong:

→ It optimises for the wrong thing. Efficiency and time-on-app are not the same as family wellbeing.

→ It ignores who’s actually doing the work. The invisible load — the mental, emotional, logistical labour of running a family — has never been treated as expertise worth building on.

→ It doesn’t understand care. AI today is trained on public internet data that barely represents women, let alone mothers. The tacit knowledge of how care actually works has never been encoded.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

What would AI look like if it were trained on care?

“What if we got 10,000 mothers globally and had them encode how they think — about dinner, the weekend schedule, a sick neighbour, a child’s hard week? It hasn’t been done before. But why couldn’t it?”

That data doesn’t exist because care work has never been treated as expertise worth collecting. Not because it isn’t valuable — because it hasn’t been prioritised.

Avni believes it’s trainable. She believes AI can be built to understand not just the task of care, but the second and third-order reasoning behind it. But only if founders are willing to ask harder questions about what they’re actually building — and for whom.

What Are Parents For in the Age of AI?

It’s the question Avni is sitting with. And her answer is quietly radical.

“Presumably, in the not-so-distant future, AI can do the functional work of parents — tutor, coach, cook, coordinate. So humans can just human. My job is to bear witness. To be present. To be imperfect and just try.”

Her advice for families navigating right now:

→ Be conservative about anything algorithmic and designed for more time-on-app. Strong limits — or not at all.

→ Let your kids experiment, build, and ask questions. They’re teaching you more than you’re teaching them.

→ Teach them physics, philosophy, and poetry. Three poles far enough apart that they learn to think — not just to optimise.

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