the ai startup trying to change how we think about companionship

A team of Pakistani computer science students is betting that the next AI breakthrough isn’t a smarter chatbot, it’s one that never leaves your side.

ISLAMABAD, Three students at Capital University of Science & Technology think the AI industry has been solving the wrong problem.

While most AI companion apps compete to be the most entertaining chat window on your phone, Abdul Rafey, Azain Akbar, and Muhammad Luqman are building something that doesn’t live in an app at all. MISTRESS is a 3D companion that lives on your desktop, watches your screen when you ask it to, and quietly points you toward the button you’ve been hunting for, instead of making you leave your work to go find a tutorial.

“Most AI assistants wait for you to summon them, answer your question, and vanish. “We wanted something that’s just there. Not watching everything, not taking over your mouse, just present, the way a colleague sitting next to you would be.”
Abdul Rafay, the CEO of mistresslabs

A problem hiding in plain sight

The team’s pitch starts with a number that surprised even them: according to a 2025 survey by design firm MOO, nearly 79% of knowledge workers report feeling isolated at work, a figure that climbs to 89% among Gen Z employees. Separately, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found fully remote workers are roughly 1.5 times more likely to report daily loneliness than their in-office peers.

Their response isn’t a new productivity app. It’s a companion, deliberately, and in that order. MISTRESS’s own internal documentation states its philosophy bluntly: companionship is the purpose, and its ability to help with tasks is simply the language that companionship is expressed through.

The Tamagotchi Effect

Ask the team where the idea came from, and they don’t point to Silicon Valley. They point to 1996.

That’s the year Bandai released the Tamagotchi, a pixelated digital pet on a keychain that demanded to be fed, cleaned, and played with. It sold more than 100 million units and, decades later, is still cited by design historians as one of the first objects to prove that emotional attachment to a machine doesn’t require good graphics or a storyline. It requires behavior, something that needs you back.

“The Tamagotchi didn’t simulate love. It just asked for attention, consistently, and people gave it.”
Luqman, Technical Writer

“We think that’s the actual lesson AI companions should have learned, instead of just making chatbots talk more convincingly.”

Not your typical AI girlfriend app

It’s a comparison the team is careful to head off. Unlike Replika, Character.AI, Nomi, or Kindroid, the four platforms that currently dominate the AI companion market, MISTRESS doesn’t just talk. It can see the active window on a user’s screen, identify the interface element they’re looking for using a vision-language model, and point to it with its own on-screen cursor.

Crucially, it never clicks anything itself.

“That restraint is the whole design,” the team notes in their project documentation. “A companion that cannot help is just decoration. A helper that takes over your computer isn’t a companion anymore, it’s an agent you have to supervise. We didn’t want to build either of those.”

The caution extends to the business model. Rather than the subscription tiers and memory-gating features that have drawn criticism elsewhere in the AI companion industry, the UK’s Ada Lovelace Institute warned in a 2026 report that some platforms use “retention mechanics optimized for dependency,” including charging users to preserve their own conversation history, MISTRESS’s monetization is cosmetic only: avatar skins, voice packs, and persona presets. Memory, conversation, and guidance stay free, permanently.

A market already moving

The timing isn’t accidental. The global AI companion market was valued at $37.73 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $435.9 billion by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights, a 31% annual growth rate that makes it one of the fastest-expanding categories in AI. Companion apps have already been downloaded more than 220 million times worldwide, with revenue per download more than doubling between 2024 and 2025.

Most of that growth, though, is happening in pure-conversation apps. MISTRESS is staking its bet on the gap next door: an AI that’s present in your actual work, not just in a separate window you have to remember to open.

What’s next

The project is currently in development as the team’s final-year engineering project, with a working prototype built around a user-importable 3D avatar, a locally-run open-source language model, and an on-screen guidance system, expected over the coming months. A physical version is also planned: a small desktop display using a 150-year-old theatrical illusion called Pepper’s Ghost to make the companion appear to float above the desk as a pseudo-hologram.

Whether MISTRESS becomes a product or stays a standout student project, the team says the underlying bet is the same one the Tamagotchi made in 1996: that people don’t just want smarter software. They want software that stays.

Rafay

I write on whatever I want to write, mostly because I can.