Mia is founded by Kirsten Groskopf and Francis Tao. They met a decade ago as colleagues at International Justice Mission, the world's largest anti-slavery organization. Previous to Mia, Kirsten served as the Global VP of Enterprise Planning & Effectiveness at International Justice Mission, and Francis launched a software startup that was acquired by Mailchimp.

Kirsten and Francis started Mia because they both experienced life's hardest moments and wondered to themselves: "where's my village?" Kirsten, through postpartum depression, and Francis, caring for his ill mother while raising young children.

They are highly motivated because they believe they have found the missing link that causes the plague of loneliness in our culture. Through hands-on research and interviews they believe they have a solution that can turn "let me know how I can help" into a working village; that can turn transactional help into relational community.

Kirsten and Francis have created Mia Beta over the past two years, near-entirely out of pocket. Their non-negotiable belief is that this problem cannot simply be solved with AI or another sign-up tool. They believe it requires an expert, providing best practices on how a village should approach helping someone in deep waters.

Mia's logic has been painstakingly trained by a close friend, a mental health counselor with 10+ years experience, to give guidance to the village on how to help. It considers situational factors, personalities, the abilities, of not just the person in need, but the members of the village as well. With her experience, she helps the village make offers that are relevant and more likely to be accepted.

With your support, we can move Mia beyond Beta, and expand beyond our first two types of support: having a baby, adopting/fostering, and cancer. Next on the docket are customized journeys for situations such as unexpected illness, surgery, loss of a spouse, loss of a child, parent deployed in military, starting over as an immigrant, miscarriage, and much more.

We do not have VC or big tech funding. We do not have advertisers or sell data. We built Mia as a webapp for full autonomy -- we are not beholden to Apple App store or Google Play. Our app does not employ AI. We have not paid ourselves for this work. Please help us realize this dream.

Should we eventually charge a monthly fee, contributors of any amount will be grandfathered in to free use of Mia. Instructions will be provided in the GoFundMe thank you email.

Financial support will be used primarily to pay for software engineering. Mia is not a charity. Mia is a business, and this page was created using GoFundMe For Business.