Experts have always had more knowledge than time. Pickmybrain, a Tallinn-based startup, is building a direct solution to that problem by helping professionals, public figures, and domain experts turn their knowledge into AI-powered advisors that offer practical, on-demand guidance. The platform just closed a funding round that signals growing investor confidence in this approach.
The company has raised €1.8 million ($2.1 million) in a pre-Seed round to grow its team, scale into new markets, and enhance the product. Investors include business angels such as Garri Zmudze, an early investor in drug discovery company Insilico Medicine, and Raison.app, an investment platform with $250 million in assets under management.
How the Platform Works:
Pickmybrain works by training AI models on an expert’s structured knowledge, such as interviews, articles, books, and recorded responses. Experts have full control over the content the AI is trained on: they upload their own media and consent to the LLM’s use of any third-party resources. That consent layer matters. Most general AI tools pull from the open web with no curation. Here, every training input is deliberate.
For individuals with limited digital footprints, Pickmybrain provides tools to record thoughts, which the AI then utilises to learn. So an expert does not need to have written a book or done a hundred interviews to build a Digital Brain. They can start from scratch, on their own terms.
A Hybrid AI and Human Model:
What separates Pickmybrain from a simple chatbot wrapper is its routing layer. Users can ask these Digital Brains questions based on a particular expert’s insights, while more important questions are sent directly to the expert through 1:1 asynchronous video. Routine queries are handled by AI. High-value interactions go to the human. It keeps the expert’s time protected without cutting off direct access entirely.
Sergei Verbitski, founder of Pickmybrain, is a serial entrepreneur across AdTech, trading, iGaming, and digital marketing. His framing of the product is practical. He said: “Just like Patreon helped creators monetise content, we are enabling professionals to monetise their expertise without becoming full-time content producers or mentors.”
The Expert Economy Argument:
The company aims to shift from the ad-driven creator economy to the expert economy. It highlights that it provides a transactional, utility-focused alternative for monetising expertise without depending on ads, followers, or constant content creation. That framing resonates with operators and founders who have built something real but have no interest in becoming full-time content machines to extract value from it.
Pickmybrain’s positioning sits at the intersection of two accelerating trends: AI personas entering the mainstream, illustrated by Khaby Lame’s January 2026 deal, in which the world’s most-followed TikToker licensed his likeness for an AI digital twin in an all-stock transaction valued at $975 million, and growing demand among professionals for ways to share expertise at scale without becoming full-time content producers. The Lame deal is an extreme example, but it shows how seriously the market is beginning to value digital likenesses and AI-driven knowledge products.
Who is Already on the Platform:
The company says more than 1,000 experts have already joined the platform. That list includes Slush founder Peter Vesterbacka and World Cup winner Paul Pogba, along with executives such as Bozoma Saint John, who has held senior roles at Netflix, Uber, Apple Music, and Pepsi. The mix of sports, entertainment, and business figures signals that Pickmybrain is positioning itself across industries, not just the startup or tech world.
For developers and operators thinking about knowledge management inside organizations, there is a parallel application worth noting. Verbitski has noted that these Digital Brains will evolve into AI assistants that enhance workflows, maintain context over time, and act as persistent team members. That points toward an enterprise use case where institutional knowledge does not walk out the door when a key person leaves.
What This Means for Knowledge Monetization:
The expert monetization AI space is still early. What Pickmybrain is building is a layer between a person’s knowledge and the people who want access to it, structured, consented, and scalable. You can think of it as a permanent, interactive version of someone’s best thinking, available on demand to anyone willing to pay for it.
If you are a founder with domain expertise, an operator who has solved problems others are still facing, or a developer looking at the infrastructure side of the knowledge economy, Pickmybrain is worth following. The platform lets experts earn from what they already know, without rebuilding their schedule around it. The Digital Brains for experts model, if it scales, could quietly change how advisory relationships work across industries.
