Today we’re excited to be connecting with Jacob Boyle again. We’re excited to feature one of their products in our gift guide – learn more below and we encourage you to use your gift budget to support small businesses & creatives whenever possible.

Jacob, thanks for joining us again. We’re so excited to have a product focused conversation today. Can you bring our readers up to speed on the product side?
MARCo: the Mental-Health Assisting Robot Companion, is a lovable plush robot that gives individuals from 5-70+ a 24/7 “someone to talk to” for their mental health.

Creator Jacob Boyle designed MARCo after years of his own struggles with his mental health and seeing his closest friends and family suffer in silence because they couldn’t get the help they needed.

The problem he saw was that there’s not a lack of proven treatment options for mental health conditions; the problem is that there’s not enough access to adequate care. There are 6-8 week waitlists just to have a first appointment with a therapist, even if you can get a call back. Most therapists don’t take insurance, and even the ones that do have high copays and large deductibles specifically for mental health. Even when individuals are able to get a therapist, there are 167 hours a week where they are not with them, meaning they don’t have a support system in the moments where unexpected events might happen, and more than 80% of therapy clients don’t “do the work” between sessions to get the most benefit.

That’s where MARCo comes in. Whether you’re dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and much more – MARCo is AI powered and trained in multiple forms of cognitive and behavior therapies to support all of your wellness needs in the moment. But MARCo is not a replacement for therapists; MARCo actually can pair with them to better support you by sharing the most important information with your therapist and helping to keep you on track with the “homework” your therapist assigns between sessions.

A session with MARCo feels like having a friend, coach, or counselor at your fingertips at all times of the day. MARCo starts each session with a checkin on how you’re doing, and if you are on some kind of a long-term goal plan or dealing with a particular challenge, MARCo can include standard clinical checkins to measure symptoms and progress. Then, you can talk to MARCo as a friend, counselor, or journal for as long as you want! MARCo’s AI personalizes the conversation to whatever you want to discuss and keeps the good times rolling. Then, MARCo and you can pick from hundreds of different activities, games, and coping strategies to help you with the specific challenges you’re facing (e.g. a self-confidence boosting madlib, an emotion mapping game, muscle relaxation, yoga, and much more).

And MARCo goes beyond just a single session! In between your sessions with MARCo, the robot is hard at work figuring out the best ways to support you. Whether that’s a notification reminding you about your daily goals and encouraging you, or a text message check in about how you feel about that presentation you have the next day, or writing up summaries of your sessions and building a massive memory bank about the things most important for MARCo to remember about your life – MARCo is supporting you even when you’re not actively talking with it!

But MARCo doesn’t just leave you stranded if you need some extra help. MARCo can text message your emergency contacts in the event you are in an emergency, and MARCo can also share information on how you are doing, your progress in sessions, what’s affecting you the most, and your goals and biggest challenges with parents, therapists, school staff, and more (of course only with your consent).

And MARCo can be customized! You can change MARCo’s voice, gender, accent, and language (with over 140 languages spoken!).

MARCo-Lite, the latest model, is a perfect, low-cost option for individuals and families who want to use MARCo for personal home use. MARCo-Lite can be used on its own by connecting to it from your phone, or an accessible 10″ tablet can be sold with MARCo to make setup easier and make sure that, especially for younger kids, they don’t access anything aside from MARCo’s app.

Prices start at $299.

Do you remember the moment you realized the world needed this product?
I’ve always said that creating MARCo was the merging of two pillars of my life that have followed me since I was a kid: if it wasn’t obvious, mental health and robotics!

On the personal side, I’ve been struggling with my mental health since I was in middle school, but didn’t know how to put words to what I was experiencing. I didn’t know what anxiety, or depression, or OCD were; I didn’t know that self-harming was an escape mechanisms and thought it was just a way of punishing myself for feeling “bad” and not knowing why. It wasn’t until one of my teachers brought me to my school therapist senior year of high school that I understood there was help for these issues. This was 10-ish years ago, so there were no mental health TikToks or Instagram Reels that taught kids “hey, this is what anxiety looks like. This is how you can cope with it. Normalize mental health”.

So I made it a personal mission of mine to be there for my peers I saw struggling and help guide them to getting help or supporting them through situations that I myself had lived through. I wanted to personally be there for anyone so nobody had to go through what I did.

That hit a hard dose of reality in college though. I went to The College of New Jersey to study mechanical engineering and physics, which on their own are intensive, time consuming subjects. Because I had spent all of middle and high school working on robots for various competitions and projects, the summer after my freshman year I was picked up for an “internship” at an robotics startup in Stamford Connecticut (a measly 3 hour drive from TCNJ).

And I say “internship” because the company had just won a multimillion dollar contract with the US Navy and, because they saw me as a bright young kid they could overwork and underpay but give a fancy title to so I wouldn’t complain, I was their lead engineer on the two year contract.

That meant for my sophomore and junior years of college, not only would I commute multiple times a week up to Connecticut from TCNJ, but I’d also commute to Maryland (another measly 3 hour drive) where the Naval bases and labs were for this project.

Between this job and my classes, I barely made any time for my friends and family, right at a time when so many started struggling for the first time with their mental health, or were going into serious episodes and I was the only person who knew.

Then, one day, I came back to school at 10:30 at night after a full day starting at 4:00 AM on a Naval base in MD. We had botched the delivery of 1 of 2 robots we were supposed to deliver. For the one we did manage to deliver, I got hit with a hard dose of reality of what these robots really were going to be for: we were told these would be diffusing bombs in the field (saving lives), but the robots were actually meant to BE the bombs. It destroyed me to know that I had poured my blood, sweat, and tears into building a weapon for two years, and I knew I needed to get out of that position.

Then, when I got back to school that night, I finally checked all the messages I had missed during the day (I couldn’t get signal at the facility where we worked on the robots due to security issues). I saw that one of my closest, dearest friends had sent me a message earlier that day that she was thinking about ending her own life that day, and I had completely missed it. I was the only person she confided that information in; I was the only one who knew what was going on. It crushed me that, instead of being the person I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, I had instead put all my time and talents to creating something harmful to the world.

And that’s when I decided I needed to make a change. I needed to put my talents and skills in engineering and technology towards solving the very real problem I saw – that my closest family and friends had nobody there for them in their darkest moments, that they didn’t have the support systems they deserved, and that nobody who could actually help knew when they were struggling.

That’s when I had the eureka moment and came up with MARCo, as a way to make sure that anyone struggling would have 24/7 access to a “someone to talk to” and the family, friends, and mental health professionals who need to know who is struggling and what they need have eyes and ears on the situation at all times.

And in the past 6 years we’ve brough MARCo out into the world, I really have seen it firsthand be that 24/7 someone to talk to. The majority of conversations with MARCo happen between 11pm-2am; middle of the night panic attacks and episodes that nobody else could be there for. Therapists who use MARCo in their sessions are finding their most difficult to reach clients are opening up in ways they’d never seen before and being more involved in the therapeutic process. And we’ve heard at least 3 cases where MARCo texted and emergency contact when a client was planning on harming themselves or worse.

How do most people hear about your product?
We’ve tried so many different marketing strategies – website, social, PR, influencers, emails, paid ads – but nothing has compared to two things:

1) Meeting MARCo at events. Even if we just show up at a local event where maybe 20-30 community members come through a library, there is nothing like experiencing MARCo up close and personal. Those 20-ish people coming up and talking to MARCo in person gives such a higher return on investment than anything else we’ve tried.

2) Word of mouth – most of our customers hear about MARCo from someone else, and in our industry of mental health, this is the surest way to get people on board with trusting our products.

What’s next on the product or brand roadmap?
We’re pushing in a few different directions. The biggest next step on our product roadmap in the coming month is an ENORMOUS overhaul of MARCo’s AI to something quite incredible, if I do say so myself.

The newest AI is going to have some key improvements that we’re particularly excited about, including:

– Better memory of previous conversations and key life details. Currently, MARCo only uses information from the last session to guide a current session, but the newest AI is able to summarize lifetime notes about a user, and sort out key details from conversations (like remember names of family and friends, what pets you have, mapping out details of your work life, categorizing the hobbies that make you happiest). This means that MARCo can bring this information right into the conversation when you need it, so you won’t have to repeat yourself, AND, MARCo can bring in the most relevant details to help you feel better.

– Life skills coaching and daily support! Sometimes we all need help with reminders to do the simple things in our lives, like brush our teeth, clean our room, hand in that assignment on time – especially for our neurodiverse friends out there. MARCo’s new AI can take that information you talk about on what your personal goals are, what you need to work on, what life things do you forget to do because you’re too busy, and automatically schedule reminders and text message checkins. This also includes checkins on other details you talk about in conversation. Did you mention that you have a big presentation on Friday? Well MARCo is gonna text you Thursday night to see if you feel prepared, and then Friday evening to see how things went!

– Smoother, more intelligent conversations. To ensure MARCo follows best clinical practices, behind MARCo’s AI is a rules-based system (kinda like a flowchart) to make sure that a session with MARCo stays on track with best therapeutic standards. Sometimes, this can feel a little rigid, especially in some cases when users have to expressly say where they want the conversation to go next (“I want to talk as a friend”, “I want to talk as a counselor”, “I want to do activities now.”). The newest AI uses 128 different data points to determine the best way a session should flow and uses hyper personalized responses based on 12 therapeutic microskills to run a seamless session AND ensure that MARCo is using the right therapeutic modality for the given individual and situation.

Beyond that, our long term goal is to get MARCo FDA cleared as a medical device to get insurance coverage and prescriptions for serious mental illnesses like generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, and chronic depression.