The number of people turning to artificial intelligence for therapy is only rising, as over 5.4 million U.S. adolescents and young adults now turn to chatbots for mental health advice. Wellness companies are taking notice, leveraging a key opportunity to enhance mental healthcare amid a clear technological and cultural shift.
Look no further than Jimini Health, which integrates clinician-led care and AI into its therapeutic methods. The company has just landed $17 million in seed funding from M13, Town Hall Ventures, LionBird, Zetta Venture Partners and OneMind, bringing its total funding to more than $25 million.
Those funds will help the mental health company enhance its clinician-supervised, patient-facing AI infrastructure, such that large behavioral health provider organizations and providers can utilize patient-facing AI safely, compliantly and at scale, as licensed clinicians oversee the entire process.
Jimini launched in 2024 with $8 million in pre-seed funding.
Jimini’s platform, Sage, works as a patient-facing behavioral health AI designed for use within large clinical organizations, not as a consumer app. Its AI agent essentially acts as a supervised member of the care team, while remaining compliant with federal and state regulations as clinicians remain in control.
The company employs full-time licensed clinicians treating real patients on the platform. Sage also closely adheres to clinician protocol and does not improvise its own care plan, with every interaction visible to the supervising clinician.
“It is entirely clear to us, and our early adopter clinical partners, that patient-facing LLMs will soon be a core part of patient care in behavioral health,” said Jimini co-founder and CEO Luis Voloch, who previously co-founded Immunai, an AI-driven cancer immunotherapy company valued at over $1 billion. “We are looking for the forward-thinking health system partners who want to define what responsible AI looks like in this category — before it is defined for them.”
Last year, Jimini authored a white paper outlining principles for responsible artificial intelligence use in therapy settings, offering a structured approach for incorporating large language models (LLMs) into mental health treatment while maintaining clinician oversight.
AI in healthcare is unavoidable, to the point that the federal government is already taking steps to ensure its safe deployment. Last December, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the FDA jointly announced major steps toward to safe clinical AI usage, indicating approval of wider adoption of tech-forward care in the near future.
“As CMS and other payers create new pathways for technology-enabled care, the stakes for getting AI right in behavioral health have never been higher,” said former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Obama and Jimini investor, Andy Slavit. “Jimini is building what the industry needs.”
Jimini also has a robust clinical advisory board, with Dr. Sabine Wilhelm of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Seth Feuerstein of Yale Psychiatry and Professor Nikolaos Daskalakis of Harvard and BU, as well as chief scientist Dr. Johannes Eichstaedt, who has studied AI safety in psychological settings, and Moderna co-founder Robert Langer.
Following the funding boost, the company is eyeing partnerships with some of the largest behavioral health provider organizations in the country while growing Sage’s clinical capabilities.
