AI Therapy Startup The Path, Backed by Tony Robbins, Raises $14.3 Million Seed Round
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The Path, an AI therapy app, has raised $14.3 million in seed funding led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, boxer Deontay Wilder, and Designer Fund.
The company grew out of an earlier mental health app for men called Mental. When its founders noticed that one feature, AI interactive audio, was resonating strongly with users, they set out to build a new and, they hope, safer kind of AI therapy app. Co-founder and chief executive Anson Whitmer and co-founder Tyler Sheaffer were both early employees at the meditation app Calm. Author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, a partner at Prime Movers Lab, became so engaged with the startup after the firm invested that he joined as a co-founder, helping shape The Path into a therapy-plus-coaching app that draws on his self-improvement methods.
Whitmer’s interest in mental health technology came from painful personal loss, which set him on a path to earn a PhD in psychology and eventually to bring research-backed approaches to a wider audience. He worked at Calm until 2021 but came to feel the impact was not large enough, because people’s problems are deeply personal and individual, and there will never be enough therapists for everyone to access one-on-one care.
Whitmer sees large language models and AI as a way to bridge that gap, giving more people personalized access to support. He notes that this is already happening to some degree, citing OpenAI’s statement that at least 900 million people use ChatGPT for mental health-related queries every week. The problem, in his view, is that consumer chatbots are optimized for engagement, which runs counter to what therapy and coaching should do. Those bots tend to solve problems quickly and reinforce a user’s existing ideas to keep them coming back, whereas good therapy works by understanding a problem deeply, surfacing assumptions, and helping a person reach their own resolution.
According to the company, The Path’s specially trained AI model scored a 95 on the mental health safety benchmark Vera-MH, compared with a top score of 65 for consumer bots. Whitmer says the model is meant to challenge users rather than simply agree with them, and that it is post-trained from open-source models rather than built as a wrapper over major consumer LLMs. The app lets users choose from 11 virtual AI therapists and adjust preferences such as how direct they want the responses to be. It is currently free as it builds its user base, with plans to eventually charge $40 a month. The fresh capital will go toward growing the team, scaling the platform, and pursuing clinical research.
This article touches on mental health and suicide, which are sensitive topics. Anyone struggling personally can reach out to a mental health professional or a trusted person for support.