BI mother-daughter duo launches new AI tool to help organizations

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Seattle area-based Convexus, co-founded by mother-daughter duo Merrill and Doña Keating of Bainbridge Island, has launched a collaborative civic tech platform that aims to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help organizations facilitate dialogue and reduce fragmented conversations.

Convexus is intended to be used by a wide range of organizations and entities, including local government, civic organizations, and nonprofits, Doña said. The co-founders have self-funded the platform and are looking for venture capital/investor funding, Merrill said.

“It’s really one of those situations where we decided there was another way for people to come together and to start going from discussion and analysis paralysis to making decisions and taking action. That’s really the basis of the tool, because it’s a platform, it’s more of a collaborative decision platform, and it just transforms the dialog into really documented outcomes for teams, communities and advocacy organizations,” Doña said.

Convexus uses a framework of explore, align, and act, which aims to guide participants through organized processes to coordinated action. “I ended up kind of being brought on board because of my work in advocacy and leadership, and seeing this need for a solution to this problem. Being in the advocacy field for so long, you kind of see that in a lot of ways. A lot of discussion happens, but there’s no actual solutions, and from other tools we weren’t really able to get the same impact as Convexus does,” Merrill said.

Merrill attended Bainbridge High School and graduated from the University of Washington in 2025 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. She was also named USA Today’s Washington State Woman of the Year in 2024.

Doña, who is Merrill’s mother, is chair of the city’s Ethics Board and brings 30 years of experience in strategic and leadership consulting work.

Convexus has several pilot partners, which allows the company to stress test the product and receive feedback, with partners having the option to become clients after the pilot phase. The tool is fully operational and has the ability for further refinements, including scalability, Doña said.

Merrill described the reasoning behind having a smaller group of pilot partners. “It’s good to be selective in these stages, because we’re really looking to be able to stress test it in a few different environments and different sizes of organizations. We also want to be able to spend the time to be able to get all that feedback and to be able to apply it…so we really wouldn’t want to overwhelm ourselves and also be able to get good, detailed feedback from a few pilot partners,” she said.

“The real premise is if you have decisions you’d like to make collectively with your group, this is a tool that will help facilitate you getting from the idea to the action and the implementation of that,” Doña said.