What if we could measure hope the same way we measure heart rate? What if technology could help children flourish before they ever fall into crisis? And what if one woman’s journey from loss to purpose could reshape how we understand wellbeing itself?
Meet Luanna Eroles, founder and CEO of Happykids.ai, a Luxembourg-based social impact startup using data, psychology, and empathy to nurture mental resilience in young people.
From collapse to calling
“Life had a plan for me, and part of it had to happen in Luxembourg. Today I am just following the call,” says Luanna.
Her story begins in Brazil, within a fifth-generation family business that collapsed overnight due to a political decision. “I was sixteen. I watched as they took everything: cars, houses, bank accounts, except the only thing that truly mattered: Hope.” That loss shaped her worldview.
After volunteering as a teacher for 210 children in the Marshall Islands, she discovered her passion for helping others flourish. Years later, while building health tech solutions for insurance companies, she realised she wanted to “measure not just risk, but potential.” That calling, and her personal experience with depression, led her to Luxembourg, “a country that values humanity and innovation equally.” Here, she founded HappyKids.ai, a social impact company dedicated to human flourishing.
Designing tools for human flourishing
HappyKids AI helps children and teenagers not just cope with life but thrive in it. “We design science-based programmes and technologies that bring together psychology, education, and emotional intelligence in joyful, creative ways,” explains Luanna.
The company’s mission is preventive: to teach young people emotional tools most adults wish they had learned in school. “We want to teach how to name feelings, build resilience, find meaning, and design purposefully our lives for happiness.”
Their platform combines AI-powered language analysis with positive psychology frameworks. By identifying speech patterns linked to traits such as hope or gratitude, the system can detect early signs of mental distress. “Way before someone develops depression, we can track that this person entered a zone from which she needs to be taken out,” Luanna says. “We are an AI-for-good company.”
A generation in need of hope
For Luanna, focusing on teenagers was an urgent choice. “We are seeing a generation that is digitally connected but emotionally adrift,” she says. “Anxiety and loneliness are rising, not only because of social media, but also because of existential worries like climate anxiety, job insecurity, and the fear of a fragile future.”
Luanna mapped the most common emotional needs of youth, anxiety, shame, bullying, disconnection, and cross-referenced them with major frameworks of human flourishing, from Harvard to PERMA to logotherapy. The result was a set of psychological traits that can be cultivated, measured, and even digitised: gratitude as an antidote to anxiety, belonging for loneliness, empathy for bullying, hope for fear, optimism for school pressure, meaning for addiction, and engagement for apathy.
At HappyKids, these are not abstract ideals. “They are skills for life. If we can teach young people how to grow these inner capacities early on, we can change the entire trajectory of our futures,” Luanna explains.
Building impact in Luxembourg
Luxembourg has become both a home and a launchpad for the project. “There’s something very special about building a company in a country that is still shaping its own story. There’s this collective sense of becoming,” says Luanna. “Luxembourg is small in size but mighty in vision.”
HappyKids found support in many local stakeholders in the field of education and innovation, such as Dr. Michalis Spyropoulos, from LMDDC, Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou from LIST, Dr. Carolina Nikaedo from the University of Luxembourg and many more. “I have found a lot of support from Hive’s network, but also the Social Business Incubator, and the leadership team of the European School Luxembourg II, which is now our first pilot school” explains Luanna.
This year, HappyKids is releasing ‘Resilience: My Superpower Workbook’, a beautifully illustrated guide based on the science-backed PENN resilience programme. “Each page transforms clinical insights into language children can understand and enjoy, helping them see resilience not as something they’re born with, but as a superpower they can train,” Luanna says.
The company has already been recognised nationally and internationally. It was a finalist at Fit4Start, winner of the Audience Favourite Award at TouchBase, and Luxembourg’s nominee for the World Summit Awards in Learning & Education.
A mission beyond profit
“For me, it was a logical choice to be a social impact company,” says Luanna. “Long-term impact is not about the hype of the startup world, but a long-term commitment to change.”
Instead of chasing fast VC growth, HappyKids relies on donations, research funding, and partnerships with public and private institutions. “The only reason why I would open a company, and face all my fears around it, would be to try to change the world, and somehow, in a modest way, make it a better place.”
Luanna is backed by a team of accomplished co-founders who share her mission. Among them are Dr. Prof. Marie-Anne Berron of the University of Trier, an expert in education and neurolinguistics; Lucas di Salvo Mello, Head of AI at Bradesco Bank; and Leandro Lima, formerly at Meta in California and a postdoctoral researcher at the Gladstone Institute, where he explored psychiatric disease and machine learning patterns.
The challenges are, however, the patient capital, the choice of being bootstrapped, and the lack of people in the team. “We can only accelerate to our limit of human power during this maturation phase. But it is part of the game, good thing we are trained on resilience,” Luanna acknowledges.
Leading with meaning
Asked what keeps her going, Luanna answers: “Transcendence. The feeling that I am not alone in this, and there is a greater purpose to which I was called to fulfil.”
Her advice to founders, especially women and newcomers, is simple: “Build with values, not only with goals.” At HappyKids, those values are clear: Vulnerability, Belonging, Hope, and Transcendence. “Let your company be more than a business. Let it be a bridge between science and soul, between data and dignity.”
And if one day you spot bright pink banners across Luxembourg reading “This city is more beautiful because you are here,” you’ll know that HappyKids.ai has launched live to the general public, spreading its message of hope to the world.
