Helping those that help, Prague-based Upheal has raised €1.068 million in a pre-seed funding round as it launches what it’s titling, “the first ever smart notebook for mental health professionals with AI-powered note-taking.” Although no specifics were provided, according to Upheal, the investment will be used to accelerate product development.
Upheal’s help is provided by lead investor KAYA VC with the participation of Calm/Storm and Credo Ventures alongside angel investors including Juraj Masar (Better Stack), Javier Suarez (Oliva & TravelPerk), Andrej Kiska (ex Credo Ventures) Tomas Scavnicky (Parrot), Peter Zajac (Surglogs), Anton Zajac (ESET).
Although we’d all really like to think that this pandemic is done and dusted, the truth of the matter is that it’s not. Putting the economic effects aside for a moment, and looking at purely what this mess has done to mess with our minds, the statistics from the Isles of the United Kingdom alone are enough to make one shudder.
Compound this with a record number of healthcare workers (mental and physical) and the perfect storm for, well, a perfect storm is a clear and present danger.
Focusing on one field that can from time to time go overlooked, unnoticed, and have a social stigma attached to it (which is undoubtedly relaxing, but still present), Upheal is aiming to make the lives of therapists just a tad easier by offering up a dedicated mental health platform for therapists and coaches worldwide. It provides high-quality video calling features, automated full-session transcripts, and pre-organised AI summaries.
Speaking under anonymity one London-based therapist told me, “I spend on average 15-20 minutes per client per day just on notes. With up to 9 clients a day, the time regained from a service like this would free me up to spend more time actually thinking and working on solutions for and with them.”
Going beyond just transcribing sessions, according to Upheal their AI can help therapists identify recurring themes, suggest coping strategies, and flag diagnosis markers, such as beginnings of depression or mania.
At the end of each session, therapists are automatically provided with progress notes and analytics that can identify highlights such as important people and places in their client’s story. Advanced analytics offer insights into client speech cadence, therapist-to-client speech ratio, topic sentiment, and other clinically relevant data.
“The past two years put particular pressure on people’s mental health which further deepened the shortage of therapists globally. We would either need many more therapists or to rethink how they operate. We are excited about Upheal’s vision to bring superpowers to mental health professionals and free up their capacity,” concludes KAYA Partner Tomas Pacinda.
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