The App that Teaches Social Skills–How 2 Parents Are Changing Autism Care
When seven-year-old Augusto saw another child riding a scooter at the park, he would sprint directly at them.
To Augusto, who is autistic, this was his way of saying he wanted to play.
For the other children, it was confusing, they didn't understand his intent, and instead of connecting, Augusto often ended up more disconnected.
They would freeze or run away, leaving him standing there, isolated and confused.
His mother, Aline Bernardi, and stepfather, Diogo Ruiz, watched this happen over and over again. Augusto had spent years in therapy and made incredible progress. But the unwritten rules of making friends—how to approach a peer, how to ask to borrow a toy, how to read a face—remained a mystery to him. He wanted friends. He just didn't know how to make them.
During a family trip to Spain, they gave Augusto the Duolingo app to help him learn basic Spanish. He loved it. The game-like structure, the instant feedback, and the clear path forward made sense to his brain. He started picking up words almost immediately.
Aline, a product engineering leader who had managed cloud and AI projects at Atlassian, and Diogo, a serial entrepreneur, realized something profound. Technology has figured out how to teach language. But there was nothing out there to teach the complex, messy rules of social behavior to neurodivergent kids.
Neither of them was a developer. But they decided to build it anyway.
In December 2024, on Christmas Eve, Aline had an idea that felt like a Christmas gift: they needed to build a Duolingo for social skills.
By January, they had built a rough prototype using PowerPoint slides. They took widely used therapy activities, structured game-based protocols typically delivered with cards, worksheets, and guided exercises, and turned them into a digital game.
The games mirrored the exact situations Augusto was facing in real life. If you take another child's toy without asking, what might they feel? Some children are playing with a scooter, and you want to join — what do you do?
Augusto started playing with the slides. A few weeks later, the family went back to the park.
Aline and Diogo watched from a distance as Augusto spotted a child with a toy he wanted. He didn't run. He didn't grab it. He walked over, started a conversation, and asked to borrow it. The other child smiled and handed it over.
Aline and Diogo looked at each other in shock. The digital practice had actually worked in the real world. He had approached the child entirely on his own.
"He was very happy," Diogo said. "But we were way happier. Oh my god. I cannot believe he's doing that."
(He did, however, ride the borrowed scooter and then just walk away without returning it or saying thank you. Aline and Diogo laughed, realizing they hadn't built the "after" scenarios into their PowerPoint yet. "We'd never gotten that far before!" They went straight home and added them.)
That PowerPoint evolved into Mirimim, an AI-powered educational app designed to bridge the gap between clinical therapy and daily life.
In Brazil, where many families face years-long waitlists for public therapy, Mirimim is often the only resource they have. That is why Aline and Diogo made a core decision early on: the basic app will always be free.
"We will never change this," Diogo said. "It will be for people who don't have the opportunity to go to therapy."
But to survive as a business, they needed a way to monetize without putting a paywall between a child and their development.
In less than a year, Mirimim reached over 17,000 children organically across Brazil. More than 1,200 therapists started using it in their clinics, rating its clinical relevance at 92%.
But scaling a health-tech startup from Curitiba to the U.S. market — with no engineering team — required help. In March 2026, Mirimim was selected as the only Latin American company to join Multiple Hub, a prestigious California-based accelerator for autism innovation. To prepare for that expansion, they integrated Manus.
On the business side, Manus operates as an autonomous research and outreach engine. It identifies potential therapist partners in the Bay Area, formats the data for their CRM, validates email addresses, and manages the initial LinkedIn outreach. What was once a static list of names is now an active pipeline of clinical validators.
On the product side, Mirimim was facing a classic constraint. A key feature: turning user activity into structured, individualized progress reports and insights was highly valuable. This one, despite being highly relevant, ended up being postponed due to its complexity and the amount of development time required.
That changed when they began experimenting with Manus.
They started testing Manus by connecting it to their database to create a user dashboard. This is where it all changed— because the dashboard accesses user sessions, it will soon be able to generate a consistent view of how children are engaging with the activities and progressing over time. This brings them much closer to what Aline and Diogo have always envisioned: structured reports that turn usage into objective data on progress, engagement, and development.
With Manus, it can not only analyze data through the dashboard, but also structure these reports and automate the entire flow of delivery and communication with users. Something that once seemed costly and time-consuming to build is now becoming feasible, much faster, with this support.
One of the first features to come out of this: automated session reports for therapists. In about one minute, a clinician can generate a structured report ready to be added to their clinical record. It doesn't replace clinical reasoning — it removes the operational burden of documentation, so therapists can focus on what matters: the session and the child. They're already monetizing it.
For parents, clinics, and health plans, this translates into individualized insights through a subscription layer — their monetization model, built without putting a paywall between a child and their development.
Soon, Manus will begin rewriting and translating the entire Mirimim application into English at the code level, preparing the platform for its U.S. launch.
Aline and Diogo are currently raising a $100,000 angel round to finance their participation in the Multiple Hub Accelerator and secure their runway ahead of a larger seed round.
They are not outsiders trying to disrupt a market they don't understand. They are parents, not developers, who built the tool their son needed, and are now scaling it for millions of others, enabled by AI. For the founders, the real impact of AI is not in what it replaces, but in what it finally makes possible.
"Helping even one family makes it worthwhile," Diogo said. "But we are building a scalable, data-driven layer for autism care. We want to change the system."
Mirimim is currently raising a small angel round to support their U.S. expansion. If you'd like to learn more about their work, you can view their pitch deck or watch their promo video.
