Jimini Health raises $17M for its clinically supervised mental healthcare chatbot app – News

An startup called Jimini Health Inc. is targeting mental health providers after raising $17 million in seed funding to build its patient-facing artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The round was led by M13 and saw participation from Town Hall Ventures, LionBird, Zetta Venture Partners and OneMind, bringing the startup’s total amount raised to more than $25 million.

Jimini isn’t trying to replace human therapists with AI chatbots. Instead, it wants to give healthcare organizations a way to deploy patient-facing AI safely, so that qualified clinicians remain “in-the-loop,” with full access to each patient’s interactions with its system. Its core offering is a specialized chatbot called Sage, which acts more like a supervised care team member. It offers support to patients between their scheduled appointments with therapists, while operating with strict oversight.

The company is targeting more than 5.4 million Americans, many of whom are adolescents and younger adults, who currently use traditional chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude for mental health advice. It points to data from OpenAI Group PBC, which said in October that ChatGPT identifies more than 1 million conversations each week in which people make explicit suggestions about their suicidal intent.

While OpenAI does try to direct these users to crisis hotlines and mental health support groups, Jimini argues that the ChatGPT and other general-purpose chatbots were never designed for this kind of use case, and that people shouldn’t be leaning on them for advice. That’s why headlines have linked consumer-grade chatbots to tragic outcomes, and wrongful death lawsuits have alleged that some of those applications actually “encouraged” people to take their own lives.

M13 partner Morgan Blumberg was blunt in her assessment of the problem: “When 1 million people a week are discussing suicide with a product that was never designed to handle it, that’s not an edge use case,” he said. “It’s a systemic gap. Jimini is building the clinical infrastructure this category has never had: real supervision, real clinicians and real oversight.”

Jimini sells the Sage platform to healthcare providers, which can then provide access to patients that need mental health support. The underlying model has been trained to provide proper advice and follow specific care plans created by human doctors for each patient — and it never improvises. Moreover, clinicians have full access to the conversations each patient has with Sage, so they can be alerted when intervention is required.

With the funds from today’s round, Jimini hopes to scale up Sage’s capabilities and work with more behavioral healthcare organizations, so it can integrate with their electronic health record systems. The startup says the timing of the round is strategic: It comes just months after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Federal Drug Administration announced coordinated ACCESS and TEMPO programs that encourage the development of safer clinical AI systems.

The healthcare industry has spent years debating whether or not AI can move the needle for mental health outcomes. While these debates have been raging, consumers have decided for themselves that AI chatbots are therapists, whether or not medical experts agree on the wisdom of it.

That’s why Jimini believes it’s time to stop talking and start taking action to intervene. Though there will be questions about its effectiveness, it’s hard to argue that a specialized bot that can send real-time alerts to a human therapist is inferior to ChatGPT pointing someone to a telephone number.

Image: Jimini Health