Limbic, raised $14 million in March to expand into the U.S. market. Now it has done so.

The London-based mental health artificial intelligence (AI) company has clinched a partnership with the nonprofit behavioral health system Rogers Behavioral Health.

Through the deal, Rogers Behavioral Health is changing its “front door” intake system from primarily phone-based to allowing patients to enter care through Limbic’s AI chatbot.

“As we’re continuing to evolve in behavioral health, we’ve got to start looking at the users and our consumers of it, and how we reach them in different and new ways.” Brian Kay, chief strategy officer of Rogers Behavioral Health, told Behavioral Health Business. “Limbic is a fantastic way of reaching individuals who may not access care otherwise.”

Rogers Behavioral Health provides care for mental health conditions and substance use disorders (SUDs) in 10 states. The Oconomowoc, Wisconsin-based provider operates three inpatient behavioral health hospitals, 17 residential programs and 22 centers offering partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient programs (PHP/IOP). Rogers is set to open another PHP/IOP clinic next week.

Rogers plans to launch the new Limbic intake portal on its website by the end of 2024. It will be clearly marked as AI and available 24/7 to start patients’ intake process, requesting information about a patient’s symptoms and demographics. The software, called Limbic Access, then provides clinicians with a clinical assessment complete with disorder-specific measures and can make recommendations for a potential diagnosis based on intake information.

A clinician always makes final determinations for the appropriate level of care, Kay said.

Prior to the partnership with Limbic, Rogers used AI for data analysis and is piloting Microsoft’s ambient listening technology, called DAX, which helps clinicians with note-taking.

Rogers also hopes to see the Limbic portal lower barriers to care for people who are more likely to encounter mental health inequities, including marginalized groups. A peer-reviewed article published in Nature Medicine demonstrated that Limbic’s technology improves access to care among minority populations, including non-binary and ethnically diverse groups.

“Our primary front door is individuals who call over the phone … or they come to our door[and] do that face-to-face assessment,” Kay said. “There are groups of individuals out there who are not comfortable going through that process. If you’ve got a high amount of anxiety, if you’re from certain demographic groups, … they’re less likely to call or go face-to-face. We felt that this was a major piece that we weren’t considering before.”

The Rogers deal comes about six months after Limbic clinched its $14 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures and including Gaingels and Illusian. The company now plans to clinch new collaborations and increase its scale in the U.S., according to Limbic’s CEO Ross Harper.

The company also owns another generative AI solution, called Limbic Care. The mobile app provides a care companion that works with patients while they are on waiting lists and in between treatment sessions. Harper said the solution would land in the U.S. “pretty soon.”

The U.S.’s behavioral health workforce shortages make the country ripe for Limbic’s solutions, Harper said.

“We really see the opportunity in the United States to be … genuinely era-defining,” he told BHB. “We are entering a new era, and Limbic aims to set the standard for what safe, responsible AI transformation of healthcare can look like.”

The “responsible” nature of Limbic’s technology was top of mind for Rogers.

“There’s just so many people who are on the AI train right now,” Kay said. “Not everybody takes the approach that Limbic took to build the body of evidence and then roll it out. That requires time, money and expertise. … There’s just so many coming online; you look at probabilities, there’s some out there that may not have that rigor.”