A mental health chatbot company led and backed by high-profile figures in the venture capital world has secured multiple rounds of funding. 

New York City-based Slingshot AI reportedly raised a $30 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest and most prominent venture capital firms in the world, and an undisclosed “fast-follow round” by Menlo Ventures, according to Business Insider. The Andreessen Horowitz-led round maintained a valuation of over $100 million, and the Menlo Ventures round generated a valuation of $220 million, the report states. 

Slingshot AI pitches itself on its website as an AI research company that expects “to learn something about human nature that no humans have before, in order to help people change their minds.” It calls its mental health chatbot Ash. 

The company has not responded to Behavioral Health Business’s request for comment.

Ash is intended to help people manage “subclinical issues” such as sadness, life challenges, relationship issues, daily health habits and stress, according to the company’s website.

In a blog post, Slingshot AI founders Daniel Cahn and Neil Parikh said they interviewed over 100 therapists and an untold number of crisis lines to form their worldview for the role of AI in mental health.

“We were positively surprised to hear how much people in the space had [thought] about using AI to take on the massive latent demand they were facing,” the post states.

Parikh is a co-founder of the direct-to-consumer mattress company Casper Sleep. The company has experienced a turbulent financial journey. It commanded a $1.1 billion valuation in its last private funding in 2019 round before its $470 million IPO in 2020, according to Reuters. It was taken private in November 2021 for about $286 million.

Mental health chatbots and other AI tools have an uncertain but seemingly inevitable place in the behavioral health industry. Previous Behavioral Health Business coverage found that experts predict that  AI-powered tools that offer human-like voice or text interactions will likely play a role in prevention and out-of-care support. However, critics of these tools have serious doubts about their ability to address acute episodes of behavioral health issues, which are most likely to occur when out of a clinician’s presence, as well as their ability to protect user data. 

Concerns like this also percolate in the general populace.

Recent survey data shows that 29% of Americans trust AI chatbots to provide accurate health information. Even among people who use AI themselves, only 36% reported trusting chatbots to provide reliable health information.

What’s more, many mental health clinicians worry that AI-backed tools like chatbots will be seen as a substitute for their work. Critics often point to the difficulty of assessing the human connection that underlies therapeutic alliance, a strong predictor of good outcomes in behavioral health. Some maintain that putting too much stock in these tools will hurt patients.

Executives in the behavioral health space are eager to see the implementation of non-clinical AI tools to make work more efficient and to take administrative burdens off of clinicians. Some also see it as a tool to ensure clinical quality and standardized practices.