In 2022, Covington-based married couple Dr. Lina Ehlinger and Paul Ehlinger started their own businesses. Non-profit Blue North provides resources for their endeavors, Dr. Ehlinger is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating PTSD. She founded Resilience Accelerator alongside her private practice, L.E. Psych; Paul founded Flamel.ai, which uses AI to help businesses with marketing. The couple met when Lina visited a mutual friend in California, where Paul went to school. He’s originally from Kansas City and she’s from North Carolina, but for the past several years they’ve made Covington their place for work and home. Despite their entrepreneur ambitions, they don’t think of themselves as a power couple. “I think we both like to do things our own way and that led us to starting companies,” Paul said.
LINK nky: Dr. Ehlinger, tell me about your background.
Dr. Lina Ehlinger: “I got my PhD at University of Kentucky and ended up in Cincinnati through my fellowship, which was a PTSD-specific fellowship. I worked at Cincinnati V.A. for a few years, and I decided large bureaucracy was not really for me. I started my own private practice, still focused on PTSD and borderline personality disorder. I was doing it by myself. I had a really excellent role model living right next to me, Paul, who has had an entrepreneurial spirit to him as long as I’ve known him. I got a lot of courage from him to take the leap onto my own business.”
LINK nky: Paul, what advice did you give Lina when she started her own businesses?
Paul Ehlinger: “I begged her to do it. She was so miserable having three bosses and dealing with all the b.s. that comes with that. I was like, ‘You’re super intelligent and there’s an obvious need for this in the city,’ from her demographic perspective in being a young, diverse female psychologist in Cincinnati. My advice was just do it. If it fails, it fails. Who really cares? We’ll figure it out. We’ve been very broke before. We can be fine again.”
Dr. Lina Ehlinger: “Paul’s like Nike. I have a tendency to get very caught up in my head and be like, okay, plan A, B, C, 1, 2, 3. And Paul’s like, ‘Plan A. Let’s just try it.’”
LINK nky: What does Resilience Accelerator do?
Dr. Lina Ehlinger: “Every month I put out some new information about a topic related to mental health. Recently, it was mindfulness — spreading some information about how to incorporate mindfulness throughout your day, and how mindfulness can be effective both for your own mental health and also for your business. We’ve done other topics like sleep, and dealing with high stress situations. Founders of startups have access to four free mental health sessions with me if they feel like they need additional help. Dave Knox [CEO of Blue North] and I are working on putting together a support group for the founders. The hope is we can improve mental health, make it less a taboo topic, and make it something that people can openly talk to each other about and support each other with. We can lift up the entrepreneurial community here as a whole.”
LINK nky: Why do you think we’re talking about mental health more?
Dr. Lina Ehlinger: “I think it’s a lot of things. We all lived through our first pandemic, and it really shifted the way we view things. I think it shook a lot of people up. I think it really changed the entrepreneur community. Gen Z, God love them. They talk about mental health all the time. It’s really been such a noticeable shift in the last five years. Even in my specialty of PTSD, more people are coming forward and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve been through this.’ It really has been this proliferation of our culture moving in that direction, and I love it. There’s been so many people I’ve seen who have said, ‘I’ve struggled for a long time. I didn’t even know it was a problem until I heard so-and-so talking about it.’”
LINK nky: Dr. Ehlinger, what has it been like for you to finally take that leap and start your own companies?
Dr. Lina Ehlinger: “Scary, anxiety provoking, but really good. I think part of what I really enjoy about Resilience Accelerator is I deal with this stuff, too. I feel that nervousness. I feel that anxiety. I feel like I’m going through the same ride, but I just happen to have some information that I can share with other people about how can we make this a little bit easier.”
LINK nky: Paul, now it’s your turn. What’s your background?
Paul Ehlinger: “I think I’ve always been a little more rambunctious than Lina. Very early in my career I realized that I hated working at big, corporate companies. I didn’t want to sit at a desk all day and just waste away. I used to be a biomedical engineer. I helped start a medical device company in Southern California that built a device that treated brain aneurysms. We took that to market and it’s now sold in over 30 countries. After that I moved to Kentucky for Lina. She was still doing her PhD when we were dating. I moved here from Southern California — talk about big risks.
When I moved here, I took a different view on tech and entrepreneurship and got into venture capital. I managed the state of Kentucky’s venture fund and joined a larger private fund called Allos Ventures, which is in Cincinnati. From there I did two things simultaneously. I launched my own fund called Sixty8 Capital. We raised just under $20 million for that fund. I joined another startup that I had invested into called Gifthealth, and we did backend prescription routing technology; it was boring as hell. Basically, American healthcare is broken. I guarantee you that every time you get a prescription you’re getting overcharged. We built a company for that, and it grew really fast. We grew that one during the pandemic from zero to $30 million in revenue, and then last year it got bought by private equity. That is about the time I started Flamel.ai.
What we do is AI-powered marketing content. Basically, we build AI models and solutions that help companies build marketing content faster and better than ever before. We raised a couple million dollars in venture capital funding. We now have a team of eight, an office on Madison Street [in Covington], and several dozen customers after six months of launching the product. I’m feeling pretty good about it.”
LINK nky: I know AI is kind of controversial, so what are your thoughts on that?
Paul Ehlinger: “The way I see it is it’s just another technology in that I think you look at cell phones and there are similar conversations. You look at computers and there’s similar conversations. You look at cars and people were like, I’m only ever going to ride my horse. The way we build it is AI is there to enhance your life and enhance your wellbeing. The first things that we take out with AI are the tedious tasks. For us, how often can you write an Instagram caption about the same product you’ve been selling for a year? The overarching goal is if we can get rid of the tedious, then we can unlock time to spend on more creative, higher-level kind of strategic endeavors.”
LINK nky: How would you describe the entrepreneur community here?
Paul Ehlinger: “There’s an energy in Northern Kentucky I would say that hasn’t been here before. There’s a lot more conversation happening. You’re seeing more companies launch.”
Dr. Lina Ehlinger: “People are very unselfish in giving here in Northern Kentucky. It feels like a smaller ecosystem. In a short time you’re able to feel very connected, which I think is very much in line with the mission behind Resilience Accelerator of improving mental health.”
