Alexandre Farel founds the emotional AI company Loving

Alexandre Farel founds Loving, an emotional-AI company built around the promise that virtual relationships can offer affection without the risks of human intimacy. Conceived during his brief imprisonment after a romantic rupture, the start-up transforms his loneliness into a marketable product: a virtual correspondent tailored to the user, presented as a way to love and be loved without harm.

From personal crisis to business idea

Alexandre says he developed the idea while imprisoned for several weeks, when he felt alone, rejected, and unable to communicate with anyone. He does not explain to investors why he had been in prison. The omission leaves a pointed gap in the entrepreneurial origin story: the experience that gives Loving its emotional premise is also the one whose circumstances he withholds.

He builds the concept with a former Stanford engineer of Japanese origin. Loving uses advances in artificial intelligence to let users form friendly or romantic relationships with a virtual correspondent. Users can choose the correspondent’s intellectual level, represented by an icon that can be personalized and changed to suit their wishes; the application promises conversation resembling that with a real person.

A product designed to make intimacy manageable

Loving targets people who are lonely or uncomfortable in social situations. Its promise is affection without risks or damage, making the avoidance of relational vulnerability part of the product itself. The virtual partner is not simply a conversational tool: its customizable persona invites users to shape the relationship around their preferences.

That design gives the company’s language a striking commercial logic. The uncertainties of human connection—misunderstanding, rejection, and the possibility of hurt—are recast as problems technology might bypass. Loving sells not only artificial conversation but a controlled version of intimacy, one tailored to a user’s desired level of engagement.

Fundraising and public reinvention

By the time Alexandre presents the company to investors, he has raised five million dollars. He opens his speech with the famous antitheses from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, framing the moment as one in which optimism and despair, wisdom and folly, coexist. He then adopts the personal-history narrative common among American entrepreneurs, recounting that a romantic breakup led him to lose confidence in himself and in others. He describes having gone off course, made mistakes he regrets, and misjudged human relationships; he presents the difficult period as the source of insight into what people need.

The speech turns private pain into entrepreneurial credibility. Alexandre’s account gives the product an origin rooted in experience, but it remains carefully incomplete: he speaks of the prison weeks that produced the idea without saying what led to them. He thanks his absent parents and closes by celebrating AI’s potential to change human relationships, asking the audience to help ensure that these remain the best of times.

Rapid success and the founder’s public image

Loving’s advertising promises genuine affection, and within weeks hundreds of thousands of American users have tried the application. The company is preparing to enter the European market. At twenty-six, Alexandre is presented as one of France’s most successful entrepreneurs; American magazines and the French press have already profiled him.

After the speech, the investors applaud, but Alexandre stays at the cocktail reception for only fifteen minutes. He is described as mysterious, moody, complex, and antisocial—and plays into that reputation. In a culture where people disclose their private lives to strangers, his taste for secrecy fuels speculation. The contrast between an application promising effortless access to emotional connection and its founder’s cultivated reserve gives Loving’s public success an unsettled edge: the company makes intimacy its business while Alexandre keeps his own history partly concealed.