The Venture Codex

Participated · Equity · Aug 2024

Clare&me builds a conversational bot that helps people with anxiety and excessive worry by delivering exercises and therapeutic conversation flows rooted in cognitive-behavioral therapy. The chatbot is available 24/7 via phone calls, SMS, and WhatsApp and operates without a human on the line to create a judgement-free zone. It is intended for use in clinical settings and predicts the most helpful conversational intervention for any anxiety-related user problem. Clare guides users through longer exercises by phone and shorter flows over text and voice. The company is led by Emilia Theye and Celina Messner and is based in Berlin, Germany. Clare&me recently raised funding to advance its technology and product roadmap. clare&me offers an AI-based mental health companion that engages users in verbal conversations on smartphones and conveys clinically proven approaches to behavioural therapy. The product is designed to feel human and to increase access to psychological support regardless of location or time. The startup aims to close the gap between demand for therapy and limited treatment capacity, targeting people who lack access to or are reluctant to seek traditional help. The company cites large global burdens of anxiety and depression and notes the pandemic has increased mental-health challenges. The prototype is currently being tested in the UK. The fresh €1 million pre-seed funding will be used to further develop the product and expand the team.

Led · Seed · Jul 2023

thymia is a London-based mental healthtech startup founded in 2020 that uses video game–inspired AI assessments to diagnose and monitor mental health conditions. Patients play specially designed games while the platform anonymously analyses voice, video and behavioural data streams to detect symptom patterns. The system captures acoustic and linguistic cues, micro-expressions and eye-gaze, and behavioural measures such as tapping, reaction times and error rates to help clinicians pinpoint diagnoses and measure treatment response. thymia’s software is designed to make assessment less subjective than questionnaires by using neuropsychology, linguistics and machine learning. The company has expanded into four new continents and its technology is now used across the UK, U.S., Spain, Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria, with plans to enter three more countries this year. thymia collaborates with academic partners including King’s College London, University College London and Oxford University, and was selected for AWS’s Healthcare Accelerator. The company intends to use the new funding to broaden the reach and capabilities of its technology. Thymia builds an online platform that uses specially designed video-game-style activities combined with Neuropsychology, Linguistics and Machine Learning to detect signs of depression and monitor symptom changes over time. Instead of questionnaires, patients play tasks that capture voice, video and behavioural data which the software anonymously analyses to identify patterns indicative of depression and treatment response. The platform is intended to empower clinicians to make faster, more objective clinical decisions and to enable continuous remote monitoring between appointments. Co-founded in 2020 by neuroscientist Dr Emilia Molimpakis and theoretical physicist Dr Stefano Goria, Thymia has gathered data from hundreds of subjects with major depressive disorder and a normative control group to train its AI and reduce racial, gender and age biases. The team has established collaborations with research institutes including UCL and King’s College London and aims to scale use of the technology to other cognitive disorders. The recent pre-seed funding will be used to gather additional data, enrich and expand the product, and grow the technical and commercial teams.