Funding Roundup: Ellipsis Health Lands $26M in Series A; New Seed Round Investments

Ellipsis raises $26M

Behavioral health artificial intelligence (AI) company Ellipsis Health has scored $26 million in Series A funding. SJF Ventures led the round, with additional participation from firms such as AblePartners, Alumni Ventures, Generator Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Khosla Ventures and Luminous Ventures, among other investors.

The new money brings the total amount raised by the company thus far up to $31 million.

Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based Ellipsis Health uses machine-learning techniques to detect and measure symptoms of anxiety and depression through users’ speech patterns. Users’ tone of voice, acoustics and language are assessed by algorithms to help payers and providers identify high-risk populations.

Ellipsis Health plans to use the funding to continue growing its customer base, expanding its global partnerships, building a multidisciplinary team and researching and developing new voice-based technology.

In a June interview with Behavioral Health Business, Ellipsis Health Founder and CEO Mainul Mondal said he believes Ellipsis Health’s machine-learning model can help deliver better behavioral health treatment outcomes and cut health care costs.

“We want to give [providers] the ability to say: ‘Here’s where you are. Here are the recommended actions. We can connect with a therapist. And by the way, here’s the intervention that Ellipsis itself can provide,’” Mondal said at the time. “That needs to be in the hands of every single individual. Health care doesn’t have to be expensive to be good.”

Affect Therapeutics scores $6M in seed funding

Affect Therapeutics — an app that treats users for substance use disorders (SUDs) — has raised $6 million in seed funding. City Light Capital, Kapor Capital, Acumen and AlleyCorp participated in the round.

Affect uses monetary incentives to help people recover from addictions to stimulants like methamphetamines and cocaine. The goal is to stimulate brain activity so users positively respond to healthy behaviors — similar to how they respond to drug use. As such, Affect rewards patients for hitting milestones related to abstinence and therapy attendance. The practice is called contingency management.

The platform also provides coaching and counseling services.

“Every single aspect of that is incentivized with contingency management incentive,” Affect Therapeutics Co-Founder and CEO Kristin Muhlner told BHB late last month. “Those can be fixed payments for specific task completion or meeting attendance, … or they can be variable payments. For example, for streaks of abstinence, … your incentive for getting those goes even higher.”

Muhlner co-founded Affect Therapeutics last year with Jeffrey de Flavio. The company boasts a patient retention rate of 56%, compared to 23% for those going through standard treatment protocols.

“When we first developed the intervention, we realized that the sort of digital experience would be one that was highly engaging, and really can drive the reward system much like helping someone through a journey, or a lot like a game,” Muhlner told Forbes on Tuesday for a story regarding the round.

The company, according to Forbes, plans to use the money raised to operate in Arizona, Kentucky and Nevada, with a goal of being active in 20 states by the end of next year. The company is currently working with payors to have its services be covered by commercial insurers as well as Medicaid.

Specialized care platform receives $3M in seed funding

Joshin, a virtual platform that links families with specialized care needs to appropriate providers, has raised $3 million in seed funding co-led by the Autism Impact Fund. The Anthemis Group also co-led the round, with additional participation from M25, Service Provider Capital and Sure Ventures, according to fundraising tracking site Crunchbase.

Joshin vets its caregivers with a background check and a requirement of six months’ experience providing disability care. Those caregivers help families deal with a variety of specialized needs, such as autism and Down syndrome. Along with caregivers — who must be at least 18 years old — Joshin also connects families with sitters and nannies.

Headquartered in the Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota-area, Joshin was founded by twin sisters Melanie Fountaine and Melissa Danielsen. The company is named after their brother, Josh, who for years suffered from epilepsy and a developmental disability before his death in 2007.

The company — which has grown by 200% over the past year — plans to use the money raised to expand its services to Los Angeles and Seattle. In addition to Minnesota’s Twin Cities area, Joshin’s services are also available in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

“For too long, people who have special health needs and their families have been underserved and had fragmented access to disability care providers,” Danielsen said in a press release. “The seed investment from Anthemis and The Autism Impact Fund enables Joshin to grow our network of care providers and expand our corporate care benefit programs. We’re continuing to scale our technology to lessen the burden of caregiving responsibilities for employees and their families.”

Joshin accepts private pay and self-directed Medicaid clients.

Young adult support app Shimmer debuts with seed funding

Shimmer, which provides online mental health support for young adults, has launched with pre-seed funding from Y Combinator.

The company is part of Y Combinator’s summer 2021 cohort. It was launched after consultation with over 400 young adults, physicians, therapists, employers, insurers, peer facilitators and other startups.

Shimmer’s support groups are led by coaches. It charges users a monthly membership fee to access its services. In addition to Y Combinator, the company also has $300,000 in funding from XX, Pillar, Blackstone LaunchPad, Human Capital and others.

“Our facilitator-led support groups solve many of the frustrations we saw early on by being more affordable and responsive to users’ needs through our expert-crafted curriculum and extremely diverse pool of peer coaches,” Cristal Wang, the co-founder and CEO of Shimmer, said in a press release. “Currently, we have tested across [black, indeginous and people of color], LGBTQ+, Anxiety, and Career-centric groups and we’ve gotten over 80% 3-month retention — and now we’re looking to expand our services to serve more people.”