PickMyBrain Raises $2.1 Million Pre‑Seed to Turn Subject‑Matter Experts Into AI Digital Brains and Monetize Knowledge at Scale

PickMyBrain, the Tallinn‑based AI platform that converts professionals' expertise into personalized AI‑powered "Digital Brains," has raised $2.1 million (approximately €1.8 million) in a pre‑seed funding round from a group of business angels and institutional backers. The raise positions PickMyBrain at the intersection of two accelerating market trends: the mainstream adoption of AI digital personas and the growing demand among high‑value professionals for ways to share their expertise at scale without becoming full‑time content producers.

The round was backed by Garri Zmudze, a longevity and biotech investor known as an early backer of AI drug discovery company Insilico Medicine, and Raison.app, an investment platform managing $250 million in assets under management, alongside a group of undisclosed business angels.

The company was previously known as WOIS.io before rebranding to PickMyBrain.

What PickMyBrain Builds and How It Works

PickMyBrain enables high‑profile experts, including professionals, public figures, athletes, and executives, to convert their accumulated knowledge into a personalized AI model trained exclusively on their own curated content. The result is a "Digital Brain": an AI advisor that responds in the expert's voice, draws on their documented insights, and delivers practical guidance to users on demand.

The platform's technical and product approach distinguishes it from generic AI assistants:

• Experts upload their own structured content: interviews, articles, books, recorded responses, and video materials
• The AI is trained only on content the expert explicitly consents to share, with no scraped or third‑party data introduced without approval
• For experts with limited existing digital footprints, PickMyBrain provides tools to record structured thoughts that the AI then learns from
• Routine and repeatable questions are handled automatically by the AI, freeing the expert's time
• High‑value, personal, or nuanced queries are routed directly to the expert via 1:1 asynchronous video responses, preserving the premium human touch that justifies the platform's transactional model

This hybrid model, AI handling volume and humans handling depth, is what the company describes as its core differentiation. No other platform currently combines both layers in this way.

The Expert Economy: A New Monetization Layer Beyond the Creator Treadmill

PickMyBrain's commercial thesis centers on a shift it calls the move from the creator economy to the expert economy. The creator economy rewards attention: follower counts, viral content, consistent posting, and engagement metrics. It is a model that favors a small number of extremely visible creators and produces very little sustainable income for the majority of professionals who participate.

The expert economy that PickMyBrain is targeting operates on different principles:

• Value is transactional and utility‑driven, not attention‑driven
• Revenue is generated per insight, per question, or per subscription, rather than per impression or per view
• Professionals do not need to become content factories to participate
• Domain expertise in finance, law, medicine, sport, business, and creative fields becomes a scalable digital asset
• Income can be largely passive once the Digital Brain is trained and the platform handles routing

Sergei Verbitski, founder of PickMyBrain and a serial entrepreneur with four previous exits generating a combined $400 million in revenue across AdTech, iGaming, trading, and digital marketing, put the thesis directly: "While AI is often framed as a threat to jobs, it's also creating new ways for professionals to share and monetise their expertise. 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."

Who Is Already on the Platform

PickMyBrain currently hosts more than 1,000 professionals across sports, entertainment, and business. Notable members whose Digital Brains are live on the platform include:

• Peter Vesterbacka, co‑founder of Rovio (Angry Birds) and founder of Slush, Europe's largest startup conference
• Paul Pogba, FIFA World Cup winner and one of world football's most recognizable names
• Bozoma Saint John, who has served as CMO at Netflix, Chief Brand Officer at Uber, and Head of Marketing at Apple Music and Pepsi

The diversity of the early user base, spanning sports celebrity, gaming entrepreneurship, and marketing leadership, illustrates the range of expertise types the platform is designed to support.

Market Timing: AI Digital Personas Go Mainstream

The pre‑seed raise comes at a moment when AI digital personas are crossing from curiosity into cultural and commercial mainstream. The company points to Khaby Lame's January 2026 deal as a market signal: the world's most‑followed TikToker licensed his likeness for an AI digital twin in an all‑stock transaction valued at approximately $975 million. That deal illustrated how digital likenesses and AI‑driven knowledge personalities are becoming recognised as substantial economic assets.

PickMyBrain is positioned to capture the professional tier of this trend, below the celebrity level but above the general consumer, where the combination of genuine domain expertise and AI delivery creates durable, monetizable value.

Use of Funds

The $2.1 million pre‑seed will be deployed across three primary areas:

• Team expansion: Hiring engineers, product managers, and growth specialists to accelerate platform development
• Market expansion: Entering new geographic markets beyond the current primarily European user base
• Hybrid AI‑human interaction layer: Further developing the technology that routes queries between the AI and the human expert, including improving the asynchronous video response infrastructure

Looking ahead, Verbitski has indicated that Digital Brains will evolve beyond Q&A tools into persistent AI assistants that maintain context over time, integrate into expert workflows, and act as ongoing team members for users who subscribe to access an expert's knowledge continuously.

Key Facts at a Glance

• Company: PickMyBrain (Tallinn, Estonia; formerly WOIS.io)
• Funding: $2.1 million pre‑seed
• Lead investors: Garri Zmudze (angel), Raison.app, undisclosed angels
• Founder: Sergei Verbitski (serial entrepreneur, four exits, $400M combined revenue)
• Platform users: 1,000+ professionals across sports, entertainment, and business
• Notable members: Peter Vesterbacka, Paul Pogba, Bozoma Saint John
• Core product: AI Digital Brains trained on expert‑consented content, with hybrid AI‑human routing
• Revenue model: Subscriptions, per‑query payments, 1:1 video response fees (20% platform fee)

Official Sources: PickMyBrain