When the founders of a mental health app for men called Mental saw that one feature — AI interactive audio — was resonating wildly with their users, they knew they were onto something.
And so the idea for a new, and hopefully safer, kind of AI therapy app was born, which they called The Path, co-founder and CEO Anson Whitmer tells TechCrunch.
Then famed author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins grew so enamored with this startup; he scooched in as a co-founder.
The Path has now raised $14.3 million in seed funding led by Prime Movers Lab (where Robbins is a partner), with participation from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, boxer Deontay Wilder, and Designer Fund.
After Prime Movers invested, Robbins began chatting with Whitmer and co-founder Tyler Sheaffer on small stuff like branding, but as his enthusiasm and ideas for the app grew, they offered to bring him in as a co-founder. The author has since helped shape The Path into a therapy-plus-coaching app that taps into Robbins’ popular self-improvements methods.
Whitmer, formerly an early employee at meditation app Calm alongside Sheaffer, says his pursuit of mental health tech was born out of tragic experiences: When he was 19, a beloved uncle committed suicide.
That inspired Whitmer to get a PhD in psychology, and he planned to go into research after graduation. But while he was in college, a cousin left a voicemail. “I didn’t realize until it was too late. It was also a call for help, and he killed himself,” Whitmer recalls.
That spurred a change of course towards work that could bring science’s findings to the masses. Working at Calm was a natural first step, as the research on how meditation improves mental health is solid. Still, after working at Calm until 2021, Whitmer felt he could do more.
“Even though we did have a big impact, it’s not really a big enough impact,” he said. “The issue is, people’s problems are just too idiosyncratic. They’re too personal. They’re unique.”
Plus, everyone will never have access to individual therapy or coaching. There just aren’t enough therapists in the world for that.
Whitmer sees LLMs and AI as the bridge spanning that gap. “What’s exciting and game-changing is that, for the first time in my career, I’ve seen that there’s actually this possibility for every single person to have the personalized sort of access and care that they need to really get the help,” he said.
In fact, such a thing is already starting to happen. OpenAI has said that at least 900 million people use ChatGPT for mental health-related queries every week.
However, the problem with using consumer chatbots for mental health is that they are “optimized for engagement,” Whitmer says, and that is the opposite of what therapy and coaching should do.
Consumer chatbots try to solve problems quickly for users, and also engage in “reinforcement” of ideas, to keep users coming back for more. “But therapy/coaching doesn’t work that way. You’re trying to understand the problem deeply,” he said. The idea is to dig out assumptions and then help the person discover their own solutions.
Whitmer says The Path’s AI is trained “to set up structure, so that later on, you can get to a place where there is resolution,” but from a place of understanding.
To that end, Whitmer says the startup’s specially trained AI model has scored a 95 on the mental health safety AI benchmark, Vera-MH. This compares to a top score of 65 for the consumer bots.
“It’s meant to challenge you. It’s not just meant to agree with you,” he says. In fact, he says the app’s model is post-trained from open source models, so it doesn’t use the major consumer LLMs at all, meaning it is not simply a wrapper over them.
The Path, which lets users choose from 11 virtual AI therapists and customize their preferences for directness and other details, is currently free as it gains users. Eventually, the startup plans to charge $40 a month.
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