Catching Up With 'Aimee Says': More than 1.5 million chats, pilot projects on campuses, and discussions with dating apps

One year ago, when Colorado AI News introduced Aimee Says as a "Colorado AI Startup to Watch," the Denver firm was using AI to help people identify and navigate domestic violence and other forms of relationship abuse.

Last year's article reported the following about the company's mission and founding:

According to the National Institutes of Health, more than 10 million Americans experience some form of domestic or family violence every year. Additionally, victims of domestic abuse tend to exhibit prolonged changes in stress response biomarkers, and many victims experience lasting psychological effects of trauma.

With all this in mind, in the late summer of 2023, Denverites Anne Wintemute and Steven Nichols began working on creating the AI app ‘Aimee Says.’ This innovative tool helps victims of domestic abuse process what’s been happening to them by providing users with valuable context and advice for dealing with what can be extremely challenging and long-lasting situations.

Twelve months later, the growing team behind Aimee Says – now comprised of CEO Anne Wintemute, CTO Steven Nichols, and data and product technology lead Anne Sallaska – reports that they've surpassed a total of 1.5 million chat messages. The startup has also built an employer cost calculator, launched higher-education pilots, and has been exploring opt-in safety coaching with well known dating apps.

Here’s what changed – and what’s ahead – with Aimee Says.

Why campuses – and why now

Aimee Says has begun pilots with Denver's Regis University and Washington's Bellevue College. The focus: first-year students and community-college populations, where early pattern-setting can matter most. The team’s aim is prevention and persistence – helping students to recognize unhealthy dynamics sooner and be able to stay in school.

The company is leaning into low-friction tactics for activation: QR stickers in residence halls and bathrooms, plus stickers handed out during freshman orientation at Regis. Each QR is location-specific, giving the team a view of which placements drive engagement. Wintemute notes that when someone scans a sticker, there’s a notably high likelihood they’ll send a first message – an encouraging signal for a tool that has to meet people in a vulnerable moment.

The community college angle matters. As Wintemute frames it, students there may have fewer on-campus confidential advocacy resources, but they face the same – and sometimes greater – pressures that undermine independence and graduation timelines. The company’s pitch to schools is pragmatic: Provide a confidential, always-available, first stop that complements (not replaces) Title IX and counseling channels.

What abuse costs employers – the Aimee Says calculator

The second push is B2B. Aimee Says has built a self-serve “employer impact” calculator that walks HR and benefits leaders through estimated costs tied to relationship abuse across a workforce: absenteeism, lost productivity, turnover, and healthcare. In one example the team shared, a 1,000-employee organization could see hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual impact.

The point isn’t scare tactics; it’s a normal-language ROI frame for making confidential survivor support an employee benefit – at pennies per employee relative to the costs companies already absorb because of relationship abuse.

The dating-app frontier: an opt-in AI “wing-woman”

Aimee Says is also in early discussions with well-known dating apps about an opt-in safety coach – an AI “wing-woman” that surfaces gentle, educational prompts when messages contain boundary-pushing patterns or subtle manipulation.

It’s prevention-first and opt-in: Dating apps connect people, and Aimee Says adds an optional safety coach – a second voice that flags boundary issues when needed.

Does it work? One team member indicated the feedback they've received suggests that many survivors won’t re-enter the dating world without Aimee Says in their corner.

Growth - and a widening footprint

By July, Aimee Says surpassed a total of one million messages sent since its launch, and by mid-October – just three months later – Wintemute reported 1.5 million messages. She attributes this rapid ramp-up to word-of-mouth and the low-friction QR code activation on campuses.

Wintemute also shared a rough geography snapshot: There are more than 1.2 million messages from the U.S., with the remaining 300,000 spread across more than 100 countries. Overall, there are now more than 10,000 monthly active users, according to the company.

Headwinds from funding cuts – and why software matters

Aimee’s expansion comes as victim-services organizations face steep funding cuts, per the team’s ongoing conversations in the ecosystem. They argue the sector is experiencing both rising need and shrinking capacity – and that low-cost, privacy-conscious software can act as a force multiplier, meeting people where they are, any time of day, in parallel with traditional services.

The company's stance on the perennial AI-privacy debate is pragmatic: Be clear about data training and ownership, empower survivors to make informed decisions based on personal risk, and don't create barriers that prevent access to critical support.

A bigger bench – for a faster product loop

The team also added Anne Sallaska, PhD, a full-stack data scientist and engineer who came to Aimee Says as a user turned contributor. Wintemute notes that in Sallaska's first few weeks she quickly put her name on dozens of pull requests (several already in production), and since then she's been speeding work on core features, from auto-generated timelines to ‘binders’ that compile notes, documents, and steps into collections tailored to a survivor’s immediate goal.

When discussing Sallaska's influence on the company, Wintemute says, "Anne’s data science expertise has accelerated Aimee’s evolution as the first technology to address relationship abuse through a personalized health lens – re-centering each survivor as the authority on their own experience.”

What's ahead

A year in, Aimee Says is shifting from a helpful tool to an infrastructure bet: Put safe guidance where people already are – dorms, HR portals, dating apps – and let survivors choose it on their own terms.

When public dollars shrink and private platforms set the defaults, who makes sure help shows up in the right place, at the right moment, in the right language? Aimee’s answer is to meet people where they already are.

For Aimee Says, even as the underlying artificial intelligence continues to get smarter, the stakes will remain very human.