New York-based Jimini Health, an artificial intelligence-backed mental health startup, has raised $17 million in seed funding.
The company launched in November 2024 with $8 million in pre-seed funding. With its latest capital raise, Jimini’s total funding now tops $25 million. Its patient-facing and patient-compliant AI platform, Sage, is a clinical-grade tool that operates within existing care pathways and the clinical context of a specific case and serves as a 24/7 behavioral health support chatbot for patients.
The tool gathers data and insights from patient interactions between therapy sessions and can triage higher-risk situations to appropriate clinical channels. It is also built to operate within emerging AI-specific frameworks and pathways designed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Yet the diagnostics and care decisions are still the responsibility of human teams. Jimini’s $17 million in funding will be used to scale partnerships with large behavioral health provider organizations and expand the AI tool’s existing capabilities.
“This is truly the next phase of what personalized, individualized care takes into account the patient and what is happening in their exact world,” Lynn Hamilton, chief commercial officer at Jimini Health, told Behavioral Health Business. “It takes into account the provider and what care pathway they’ve set out for the patient, really brings those together, providing that support that really marries both of those.”
With around 16 % of adults in the U.S. already leveraging AI tools for mental health to some degree, the demand from the patient side is there, Chiara Waingarten, the company’s vice president of business operations, told BHB. As a result, there has been an influx of “strong market receptivity” on the provider side as well.
“If your patients are already leveraging AI, let’s support them in using it in the way that it’s most beneficial to them, safest for them, and actually also supports their kind of continuous care within that organization as well,” Waingarten said.
Safety and compliance have been at the core of the team’s development of Sage. It was designed with a complex set of escalation systems that can triage accordingly based on specific clinical history and context in a situation that is specific to a patient. Jimini also has a team of in-house experts who continue to clinically tailor the AI training toward the multitude of use cases that may arise within a mental health interaction.
“Unfortunately, in the general AI world, we know that there aren’t the guardrails in place to prevent some unfortunate outcomes, and so we were very deliberate about those guardrails and the safety for both the patients and the providers and for us as an organization as well,” Hamilton said.
Sage meets the criteria of a reimbursement-ready AI tool that sponsoring organizations can be reimbursed under a CMS framework. Jimini’s tool is backed by Andy Slavitt, a former acting administrator of CMS under the Obama administration, who said in a press release that “the stakes for getting AI right in behavioral health have never been higher … Jimini is building what the industry needs.”
“There has been some new awareness in the industry and from regulators about the value that software can play in helping support patient journeys… and offering up payment mechanisms to support this software, both for the providers and for the patients,” Hamilton said. “It reimburses for how often a patient is using the software. It’s reimbursing the sponsoring organization.”
Jimini Health has not yet released data around how Sage can improve patient engagement and reduce clinician burnout, but Waingarten and Hamilton told BHB that data is forthcoming.
For now, the company is focused on scaling deeper clinical integration for more diagnoses, being able to maintain continuity throughout their journey across various levels of care and acuity.
“We’re really enabling that to be a continuum for the patient throughout their behavioral health journey, which we know can be very long and sometimes kind of like lifelong for many patients,” Waingarten said. “We’ll continue to expand our offering and one that really supports both the continuum of any one particular patient’s journey, in addition to being able to really support that full acuity spectrum as well.”
Jimini Health’s seed round was led by investors at M13, Town Hall Ventures, LionBird, Zetta Venture Partners and OneMind. The executives did not comment on any future growth plans or M&A activity that could be on the horizon.