Today, we’re proud to announce we’ve led the Series A for Slingshot, the world’s first foundation model for psychology. This brings the total capital raised for the company to $40 million.
Mental health has never been worse. While modern life is better than historical times on most dimensions, we’re increasingly lonely, sad, and anxious. Half of the world’s population will develop a mental health disorder in their lifetime. We all deserve to be happier, but the reality is we will never have enough humans to assist everyone who needs help.
We’ve always known that we needed technology to help us solve the problem. But for years, we looked at mental health chatbots and thought “who wants to talk with a bot about their feelings?”
Generative AI changed that. Seemingly overnight, the bots got 100x better and people wanted to chat with bots all day everyday. About everything!
But we knew that general purpose foundation models were not the answer when it comes to psychology. General purpose foundation models try to provide you with concrete answers. Good therapists do not. They help you recognize that you’re in control of your own life, and give you the confidence to take charge. They help you improve your connections with other people. They don’t replace them.
Recognizing this, we set out to find the best team in the world building a foundation model for psychology. We feel confident we’ve found it in Slingshot. Cofounder Neil Parikh dropped out of medical school to co-found Casper, which he grew to $500 million+ in revenue and led to an IPO in 2020. He has 7 patents ranging from sleep to robotics. Cofounder Daniel Cahn is an ML engineer, high-school dropout, who was named ‘distinguished’ by Imperial for research in AI for mental health. Derrick Hull, the Head of Clinical, has previously driven innovation at Noom and Talkspace, bringing a wealth of experience in digital health and behavioral science. The team also includes former founders and CTOs who have chosen to return to individual contributor roles, reflecting their passion and commitment to this mission. It’s rare to see a group so distinctly equipped to tackle such a challenging and important problem. And the team is eager to collaborate; to learn more and request early access to the model, visit www.slingshot.xyz.
We’re excited to be joined by many great coinvestors, including our Cultural Leadership Fund, as well as Felicis, Menlo, TMV, SV Angel, NBA stars Aaron Gordon and Scottie Barnes, Sequel (with 40 global athletes passionate about mental health), WhatIf, Harpreet Rai of Oura, Amjad Masad & Michele Catasta of Replit, Clement Delangue & Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face alongside Factorial, Mati Staniszewski of Eleven Labs, Valerie Mosley of BrightUp, Daniel Broukhim of FabFitFun, Rajiv Kumar of Virgin Pulse, Cory Levy, David Cahn, and several others. Vijay will be joining the board.
We’ve long believed that the biggest company in the world will be a consumer health company, and we’re thrilled to back Slingshot as they democratize access to support.
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Vijay Pande is the founding general partner of the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz, focused on the cross-section of biology and computer science.
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Daisy Wolf is an investing partner on the Bio + Health team, focused on consumer health, the intersection of healthcare and fintech, and healthcare software.
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Bryan Kim is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on consumer tech and app-layer AI investments.
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Zach Cohen is a partner on the consumer tech team at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on companies building at the application layer in generative AI.
