Wysa raises $20 million to expand its therapist chatbot to broader set of mental health services

Wysa, a popular mental health app originally founded in India around an AI chatbot that helps users talk about their feelings, raised $20 million in of a Series B funding round to grow its business on the heels of reaching 4.5 million users in 65 countries.

The all-equity round is led by Indian digital health-focused venture capital fund HealthQuad, with participation also from British International Investment (BII), the UK's development finance institution. The plan will be to use the silver to double in its home market as well as the US and UK, where it has already obtained FDA and National Health Service (NHS) approvals respectively and is being used. by the latter as part of its online mental health services. Originally designed to work in English, Wysa will also use part of the investment to expand multilingual support. The team currently numbers between 100 and 150 people.

Previous backers have included both Amazon and Google (which invest through their digital assistant funds), and Wysa before this round had raised $9.4 million. It does not disclose the evaluation.

To date, Wysa has served more than 400 million conversations to 4.5 million users in 65 countries, and its rise not only reflects the stresses of life in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but also the lack of resources for many manages that.

“The demand for mental health, as you can imagine, is exploding,” Wysa co-founder Ramakant Vempati said in an interview with TechCrunch. "There are simply not enough mental health professionals to meet this demand."

The executive added that in India, the country of 1.3 billion people where Wysa is based, less than 10,000 people are trained in the mental health profession. He also noted that the proportions are similar in other parts of the world. In the UK, the NHS has a waiting list of six to 12 months, Vempati said.

"Generally, access to a mental health service is closed. It's limited by or type of diagnosis - saying if you're serious enough you can talk to a therapist, because obviously therapy is expensive and someone has to pay for it,” he said.

In contrast, he noted that the app provides "early engagement and a safe space for people to come in and talk anonymously about what's bothering them."

“It encourages people to come forward,” the executive said.

Wysa, which has operations in Bengaluru, Boston and London, is marketed as a solution to bridge this gap.

Conceived in 2016, after CEO and co-founder Jo Aggarwal fell into a deep depression, the app offers a range of therapeutic techniques to users.

Vempati pointed out that Wysa works as a three-state solution. The first part is available to the masses as an AI chat offering, while its second part is more structured help from human beings, including coaches, counselors, and staff therapists. The third part, he said, is what the company calls clinical programs.

In simpler terms, smartphone users can access Wysa as a mental health app under a freemium model, while employers like Accenture, Colgate-Palmolive, Aetna International, and Swiss Re offer their support through their existing benefits, including Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs).

On the other hand, healthcare providers, including the UK NHS, as well as authorities such as the Singapore Ministry of Health, are also using Wysa as a solution for a large number of people in their country.

Vempati told TechCrunch that about 80% of Wysa's business comes from enterprise customers.

“Enterprise and B2B will become increasingly important in the future, both for business growth and impact,” he said, adding that the B2C model has always been at the fore. source of the majority of Wysa's impact on the market.

"Wysa's needs are everywhere, from high-income to low-income countries," Charles Antoine-Janssen, chief investment officer at HealthQuad, said in a statement. “Patient mental health triage using AI, which is fast, efficient and non-stigmatising for patients living in societies that do not accept it, meets a huge need in India, the rest of the low-income Asia, Africa as well as the world's wealthiest countries."< /p>

Wysa has also developed a wellness component: it guides users through cognitive-behavioral techniques (CBT) as well as regular meditation, breathing and mindfulness exercises and micro-actions to help solve their mental health problems.

"We've done a lot of clinical trials and got very strong results on patients or people with chronic pain and struggling," he said.

In May, Wysa received the Br...