Meet the Irish AI app aiming to end the chaos of organising family life

James Foskin left school at 17 and went straight into the workforce. He spent a decade in customer-facing roles across different sectors before someone told him about a new company setting up in Ireland.

It turned out to be PayPal, and Foskin was one of its first employees. He subsequently spent just over 20 years with the company, progressing up the ladder to director level.

In 2025, Foskin left PayPal to set up TiAiMe: the name stands for Ti (time), Ai (the AI engine), Me (the priority person).

It’s a life co-ordination platform designed for today’s time-pressed adults who wear multiple hats as parents, carers, professionals, diary coordinators, housekeepers and kids’ taxi.

He got the idea from watching work colleagues struggle to manage their busy lives and from seeing his wife try to keep a dozen different balls in the air when their son was ill and needed a lot of care.

“As a leader, a colleague, a coach and a parent, I had an unfiltered view of one of the most persistent problems of modern life: we are more time-poor now than ever before despite advances in technology,” Foskin says.

“This is not because people are failing. It is because the systems built to support them are failing them. Many families are using up to seven-plus systems to manage their lives, but none of them talk to each other, further adding to the mental overload. TiAiMe co-ordinates a user’s life and support network through one connected system with child protection embedded by design and human authority always overriding AI.

“Every existing tool was built for a different job,” Foskin adds.

“Calendars manage one person’s time. Family apps help one household remember plans but cannot rearrange them when life changes. AI assistants serve one person with no family layer. New AI entrants solve one slice of the problem. Every single one stops at the same wall – one person, one household, one bit of life. None co-ordinate with the people around you. None talk to each other.”

Foskin stresses that TiAiMe is not just another time management or productivity tool. Instead, he describes it as an operating system for contemporary living that works as an “intelligent AI life partner”, or a digital self that learns about a user’s routines, commitments and family structure (through an onboarding survey initially) to help lower the stress factor and avoid panics and clashes when events collide.

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For example, a parent delayed picking up a child from school can ask TiAiMe (much like talking to Siri) to find someone in their network who is free to collect the child instead. Whoever is free verbally confirms their availability to TiAiMe, which sends them the details and confirms the pickup with the parent. “What you get is one school pickup, co-ordinated end-to-end without the time-consuming back and forth of a group chat,” Foskin says.

“I have worked with many talented, capable people who were quietly overwhelmed by the invisible weight of keeping everything together,” he says. “Work, family, health, relationships. All of it managed across a tangle of disconnected tools that were never designed to work together. Watching talented female colleagues in particular wrestle with the impossible balance between career and home never left me, but I kept hitting the same wall. The tool that could truly solve this did not exist. So, I set about building it.”

Before starting to design TiAiMe, Foskin spent months talking to 175 time-pressed families about their lived experience of constantly being in a rush. “What came back was a demand,” Foskin says. “Please don’t build another app. We are already using multiple systems. Please just build one system that works across our whole life.

“Our research showed that 84 per cent of adults find co-ordinating family and support network schedules genuinely difficult,” Foskin says.

“In addition, they spend most of their time reacting to urgent demands rather than living the life they actually want. Dreams or life goals are on hold for a time that rarely arrives. It’s time for a disruptive approach to help us stop reacting to life and start building and living our lives with intent by seeing time as the enabler.”

Already 50 families have taken part in a pre-launch pilot, in advance of November’s full launch.

Foskin says the app doesn’t so much have customer types as pressure types – as in those carrying multiple responsibilities. For example, a working parent who is also looking after ageing relatives.

To date, Foskin has spent around €60,000 developing the platform, and a pre-seed start fund application is currently pending with Enterprise Ireland.

He is now looking to recruit two equity co-founders to fulfil the roles of chief technical officer and chief commercial officer and would particularly like to bring a woman co-founder on board who could bring her life experience to further developing the platform. Foskin’s ambition for the business is global, with the first phase targeting Ireland, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

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Asked if leaving PayPal to take a leap into the unknown was difficult, Foskin says, “The shift from a structured corporate environment with its teams, its resources, its monthly salary and its daily rhythm to sitting alone building a company from scratch is something nobody fully prepares you for. The isolation and loneliness of being a solo founder hit harder than I expected.

“You go from leading teams and being surrounded by people every day to making every decision alone. But I had a fantastic technical development partner in RaftLabs, and the real turning point for me was being accepted on to the tech accelerator, run by David Slowey.

“David doesn’t talk about an MVP (minimum viable product). He talks about a minimum viable business and having someone who challenged me hard when I needed it changed everything,” Foskin says.

“Leaning into the experience gained from the 50+ programmes designed and deployed from scratch during my PayPal years had shown me one thing clearly: I knew how to take something from blank page to full roll-out. Two decades building someone else’s vision had been invaluable, but it was time to build my own.”