BC Business
Zeeno is the first ChatGPT-powered iPhone keyboard in the world.
Life Story: According to Enrique Moran-Corado, moving to Canada from El Salvador was the best thing to happen to him. He didn’t have access to internet until he turned 14, and at 15 he learned English and started freelancing. “I got the right tech skills, so I was doing a lot of shitty websites and designs, and even voice acting,” he says with a laugh.
Declining offers from Google and LinkedIn paid off for him. Not only is he the co-founder and CEO of the first ChatGPT-powered iPhone keyboard in the world, he’s also a really fast coder.
“I think it happened to be a Thursday that OpenAI released the API for everyone,” he recalls. “We took that, submitted the changes to the Apple Store… and then on Saturday, we launched. In the entire world, we were number three on [curator site] Product Hunt.”
Moran-Corado met co-founders Sophie Berger and Callum Woznow while studying engineering at UBC. They launched Zeeno.ai months before graduating and got 5,000 users within the first week.
He doesn’t think AI and ChatGPT are fads, and as one of the first companies leveraging it, he’s excited that Zeeno might have a say in the direction that these technologies will head.
Bottom Line: Like switching languages on your phone, Zeeno is a keyboard extension that users can interact with directly. “You can type hello’ and get a response from the AI,” says Moran-Corado, whose business has tapped into a vertical called “conversational commerce for mobile-first businesses.”
Many small businesses running sales through, for example, WhatsApp or Instagram, don’t have time to respond to messages. Zeeno users can search for products without ever leaving the chat. So far, Zeeno has garnered over 10,000 users and secured $840,000 in pre-seed funding from Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Neo.