When the founders of a men’s mental health app called Mental saw that one feature—interactive AI audio—resonated with their users, they knew they were on to something.
And so the idea for a new, and hopefully safer, kind of AI therapy app was born, which they called The pathco-founder and CEO Anson Whitmer tells TechCrunch.
Then the famous author and motivational speaker, Tony Robbins, fell so in love with this startup company that he started 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 sprinter Apolo Anton Ohno, boxer Deontay Wilder and Designer Fund.
After Prime Movers invested, Robbins began talking to Whitmer and co-founder Tyler Sheaffer about small things like branding, but as his enthusiasm and ideas for the app grew, they offered to bring him on board as a co-founder. Since then, the author has helped shape The Path into a healing and coaching app that leverages Robbins’ popular self-improvement methods.
Whitmer, a former employee of meditation app Calm alongside Sheaffer, says his interest in mental health technology was born out of tragic experiences: When he was 19, a beloved uncle took his own life.
This inspired Whitmer to get a doctorate in psychology, and he planned to go into research after graduation. But while he was in college, a cousin left him a voicemail. “I didn’t realize until it was too late. It was also a call for help and he killed himself,” Whitmer recalled.
This prompted a change of course towards work that could bring the findings of science to the masses. Working on Calm was a natural first step, as the research on how meditation improves mental health is solid. However, after working at Calm until 2021, Whitmer felt he could do more.
“Although we’ve had a big impact, it’s not really big enough,” he said. “The thing is, people’s problems are very idiosyncratic. They’re very personal. They’re unique.”
Furthermore, not everyone will ever have access to individual therapy or guidance. There just aren’t enough healers in the world for that.
Whitmer sees LLMs and AI as bridging that gap. “What’s exciting and what’s game-changing is that, for the first time in my career, I’ve seen that there’s actually this possibility for each person to have the kind of personalized access and care that they need to actually get help,” he said.
In fact, something like this has already started to happen. OpenAI said at least that much 900 million people use ChatGPT for mental health related queries every week.
But the problem with using consumer chatbots for mental health is that they’re “optimized for engagement,” Whitmer says, and that’s the opposite of what therapy and coaching should do.
Consumer chatbots try to quickly solve problems for users and engage in “boosting” ideas to keep users coming back for more. “But therapy/coaching doesn’t work that way. You try to understand the problem deeply,” he said. The idea is to discover assumptions and then help the person discover their own solutions.
Whitmer says The Path’s AI is trained “to create structure so that later on, you can get to a place where there’s analysis,” but from a point of understanding.
For this purpose, Whitmer says of the startup’s The specially trained AI model is rated 95 on the AI mental health safety benchmark, Vera-MH. This compares to a top score of 65 for consumer bots.
“It’s meant to challenge you. It’s not just to agree with you,” he says. In fact, it says that the app’s model is back-trained by open source models, so it doesn’t use the main consumer LLMs at all, meaning it’s not just a wrapper over them.
Path, which lets users choose from 11 virtual AI therapists and customize their preferences for immediacy and other details, is currently free as it gains users. Eventually, the startup plans to charge $40 a month.
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