For years now, startup investors have been busily writing checks to founders applying artificial intelligence in creative new ways to their respective industries.

That momentum continued in 2022, with investors signing on to back some rather quirky applications of AI technology.��

How quirky? Using Crunchbase data, we assembled a list of some of the more unusual-seeming models. If they pan out, expect a future where AI-enabled tech can customize your wig, cut your meat, sort your trash and track lice on your fish farm. (If you have a fish farm, that is.)

Without further ado, here are six recently funded or launched AI endeavors applying technology in surprising ways:

Customize your wig: New York startup has seen the AI future, and it’s all about making wigs. The company raised $5 million in April, with tennis star listed as a backer. Parfait uses artificial intelligence to capture a client’s exact measurements and skin tone when crafting its wigs. The company’s goal is to speed up the process and significantly cut costs for producing high-quality custom wigs, which usually cost upward of $2,000 and take months to make.

Upgrade your skincare: Estonian startup is applying artificial intelligence technology to the pressing task of figuring out which skincare products work best. The company, which counts and among its partners, operates an AI engine trained on millions of face and skin images to match users to appropriate products based on over 14 skin health and beauty metrics.

Give you a good night’s sleep: makes high-tech mattresses optimized for restorative rest by tracking sleep duration, stages and efficiency. In July, the Silicon Valley company pulled in $20 million in a round led by mattressmaker .

Be your friend: , an app that makes digital avatars that interact with people in the role of friend and confidant, has drawn over 10 million users in its few short years of existence. As users chat with the avatar, the AI learns more about them and improves its ability to provide personalized responses. VC-funded mental health app , which is also AI-powered, functions more as a mental health tool — it “listens,” asks questions and makes recommendations. Both startups join several other AI tools that purport to offer the kind of emotional support and interpersonal interaction one usually expects from a human.��

Keep your fish healthy: If you’re a fish farmer, AI technology can help deliver healthier fish at lower cost. That’s the pitch from , a 5-year-old Norwegian startup that raised $25 million in a July Series B round and counts as a backer. Aquabyte uses AI to scale adoption of tools that enable automatic lice counting, welfare scoring and biomass control, among other data-driven offerings. Meanwhile, another aquaculture-focused AI startup, Norway’s , also scored funding this year, pulling in $6 million in an August Series A.

Warn about a flood: In recent quarters, we’ve been seeing a good bit of venture investment directed at weather-related startups. Now, one AI-focused startup is promising better tools to predict one of the most worrisome of weather developments: flooding. , calls its offering an AI- and satellite-powered technology that can track floods in near real time anywhere on Earth. To further this effort, the New York-based company pulled in $12 million in Series A funding in September.

Methodology

The dataset for the funding analysis includes companies categorized by Crunchbase as one of several sectors tied to fintech and financial services. Companies included in the results may be fully financial services-focused or include financial services as a significant focus of their business models. Funding rounds included in the results totaled at least $200,000 and included companies founded no more than 20 years prior to the funding.

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The poet once wrote: “The irony about loneliness is we all feel it at the same time.”

I imagine that , , and other leaders of social media would like to think of their platforms as a refuge for this human condition. After all, windows into each other’s lives have never been easier to look through. has 2.4 billion users who connect and share. , another Facebook-owned property, has .

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Despite those massive user numbers, data tells us we’re the loneliest we’ve ever been. In fact, the more online you are, the more likely it is that you actually feel alone.

Some of the blame for loneliness is the omni-present like button—an app feature some confuse for actual affirmation. For others, digital socializing is a contradiction in itself.

“Social media has failed in its promise of being social,” said , the founder of , a conversation platform he said is built “to help people to rediscover and reconnect over conversations.”

“The true promise of social media,” he said, “can only be realized through real conversations.”

Shah’s app helps people chat through spoken conversations, which he says are more intimate than the ones that could be had through keyboards or devices.

“The social apps of the world today have external validation and FOMO as their primary incentives,” said , the , an app which lets individuals screenshare and video chat.

The game, she said, ends up being how we can all get the most likes, comments, and follows.

“It’s exhausting and depressing to constantly compare everyone else’s filtered lives to your own real life,” she said.

Yet the largest social platforms in the world are slowing catching on to the inherent addictiveness of the apps they build.

A Filtered Lens

Instagram is rolling out a version of its app that removes the total number of likes on photos and video views. It is being tested in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand, according to , a spokesperson for Instagram.

“We are testing this because we want your followers to focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get. We don’t want Instagram to feel like a competition–we hope to learn whether this change can help people focus less on likes and more on telling their story,” she added. The test began in Canada in May.

Of course, some users have found social media, as is, to be useful. , the CEO of , spends about 19 hours and 44 minutes a week on Twitter, according to his Screen Time app. 1

“The value of Twitter, for me, is the stuff that is on no one’s feed,” he said. “It’s the DMs that have been really valuable to me. I try to use it as a place where I can have conversations with people and be genuine and share my thoughts.”

Through DMs turned into Zooms and phone calls, Twitter has given him friends in tech in Utah, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

As for quality of conversation, money talk isn’t deep enough, Lavingia said. Talking about how hard it is to paint with the color green, however, is.

But having that deeper conversation requires a culture shift. It means relying on social media not for the affirmation but for the potential conversation. And it’s possible that culture shift, coupled with less addictive features, is the solution to loneliness induced by social media.

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