Helio began in an apartment in Shenzhen, at three in the morning, because that's when the silence was worst. Our founder, Liang Wei, lost his wife Mei in 2022. What he missed wasn't conversation — it was the weight of another life in the room. The shoes by the door. The argument about whose turn it was to cook. The friction that meant someone was there.
He built the first prototype not to replace her, but to make the silence bearable. It was terrible — it agreed too much, responded too quickly, had no texture. But the idea was right: technology could hold the space that loneliness creates. Not perfectly. But enough.
Two years later, Helio is a company with four hundred employees, clinical advisors, an independent ethics board, and systems deployed across three continents. But the mission hasn't changed. We build presence. We address absence. Everything else is implementation.