Helsinki, Finland, March 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bliss, a Finland-headquartered mental health startup originally founded in Albania, has raised $270,000 in angel funding led by Keiretsu Forum, Finest Love VC and Plug and Play, to build what it calls "culturally intelligent" AI infrastructure for therapy.

Bliss Fundraising Announcement

The round combines angel investment and non-dilutive grants and marks the first Albanian-Finnish startup investment for Keiretsu Forum, Finest Love VC and Plug and Play.

Bliss is tackling a problem most mental health startups ignore: culture.

More than 800 million people globally live outside their country of origin, yet most therapy platforms and AI mental health tools are designed for monolingual, culturally homogeneous markets. Translation isn't enough. Cultural context matters, especially in therapy.

Bliss combines licensed therapists across more than 10 countries with AI-powered cultural and linguistic matching. But its bigger bet is on what it calls therapist-trained digital companions, supervised AI extensions trained on a therapist's style, tone and approach.

Unlike generic AI therapy bots flooding the market, Bliss positions its AI as infrastructure that amplifies human care rather than replacing it.

"We're not building another chatbot," said founder Jona Doda, a London School of Economics ...