Jimini Health has raised $17 million in seed funding to help behavioral health organizations safely deploy AI at scale, the company announced on Tuesday.
The New York-based company is building clinician-supervised AI tools for large behavioral health provider organizations. Its platform, called Sage, is an AI behavioral health assistant that can provide support and reminders for patients before, after and between sessions. The human clinical team supervises every Sage interaction, and clinicians always make care decisions.
The company’s funding comes as many patients are relying on unsupervised AI chatbots for mental health support. Jimini Health aims to solve two problems in the mental health space: efficacy and access.
“We believe that Jimini’s platform can help address both, by making therapists both more effective with their work and able to help more patients,” said Mark Jacobstein, president of Jimini Health. “In addition, Jimini will help with the tsunami of demand we see reflected in the (inappropriate) use of general purpose chatbots for therapy.”
The $17 million round was from M13, Town Hall Ventures, LionBird, Zetta Venture Partners and OneMind. In total, Jimini Health has raised more than $25 million.
M13 chose to invest in Jimini due to concerns with the increase in people relying on chatbots and ChatGPT for mental health support. Currently, more than 1 million people a week have conversations with ChatGPT that show indicators of suicidal planning or intent. Character.AI and Google have both settled wrongful death lawsuits over teenagers who died by suicide after conversations with AI.
“When 1 million people a week are discussing suicide with a product that was never designed to handle it, that’s not an edge case, it’s a systemic gap,” said Morgan Blumberg, partner at M13, in a statement. “Jimini is building the clinical infrastructure this category has never had: real supervision, real clinicians, real oversight.”
The financing will help Jimini Health grow its team, including hiring more forward deployed engineers, machine learning engineers and software engineers, as well as expanding its business development team. In addition, the startup is looking to partner with more behavioral health provider organizations across the country and expand clinical capabilities “across comorbidities, care settings, and patient engagement modalities,” Jacobstein said.
There are several other AI companies in the mental health space, but many focus on clinician work, according to Jacobstein. This includes companies like Eleos Health and Limbic AI. Headspace, which offers mental health coaching and therapy, has an empathetic AI companion to help patients process their emotions.
Photo: Andriy Onufriyenko, Getty Images