Seeking mental health support is a complex process, but some founders believe that using AI to formalize techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help folks who might not have access to professionals. Dr. David Burns, who has over 40 years of experience in the field of psychiatry, has now built an app, Feeling Great, based on his methods.
Burns teamed up with Jeremy Karmel, who previously led growth teams at DoorDash and Reddit, and Matt Pierce, who was a former CEO of healthcare workforce service Trusted Health, to build Feeling Great, which is also the title of one of Burns' bestselling books on mental health.
The company, which was founded in 2022, announced today that it has raised $8 million in seed funding co-led by Learn Capital and TitletownTech, with participation from Lux Ventures, Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, Pacific Health Ventures and Treble Capital. The startup is also launching its app today, which was in beta until now with roughly 3,000 users.
Feeling Great currently has 14 employees, and it wants to deploy capital into the development and marketing of the app.
Rob Hutter, founder and managing partner at Learn Capital, said that years ago, he read Burns' book and attended one of his seminars, becoming deeply interested in his work.
In the last couple of years, he reconnected with Burns and learned that he was working with Karmel on building a therapy solution and decided to invest. Hutter noted that Burns' popularity and Karmel's growth mindset are a great combination to scale the app.
The app and technology
Burns said the company had already thought about building an app that had guided lessons before large language models hit the market. However, with the release of modern AI models, the startup decided to translate Burns' knowledge into its own model to accelerate the effects of the process of feeling better.
"I am very excited that we have created an electronic tool that doesn't just reduce feelings of depression, it reduces seven negative feelings simultaneously," he told TechCrunch on a call.
The Feeling Great app has two parts: interactive courses on mental health and managing emotions distributed through illustration and stories and a chatbot that can talk with you about your issues. The latter also provides a way for you to practice techniques that could help you with negative emotions.
The company said that it developed its AI models based on Burns' T.E.A.M. (Testing, Empathy, Assessment of Resistance and Methods) approach that focuses on empathetic responses and providing actionable advice to users.
"We have developed an empathy model focused especially on trying to relate and connect deeply with the users. Plus, we have also created an evaluation framework that can tell us if AI is doing a good job of understanding the users," Karmel said.
Burns said from a physiological perspective, the app first works on making you feel better and turn negative emotions into joy. It also helps you tackle tough emotional situations when the negative thoughts return.
He added that often it is hard to train human therapists to be empathetic toward patients. But if you train an AI model, it does what you tell it to do.
Still, the startup said it is not trying to replace human therapists for you with this app, and it shows ample warnings during the onboarding process to remind users the app is not a therapist replacement. It also suggests that users dealing with thoughts of suicide should seek professional help.
Opportunity and the road ahead
The mental health space has marketplace startups such as BetterHelp and Talkspace to connect users with therapists, and apps like Calm and Headspace for meditation. Apart from these, Feeling Great would directly compete with the likes of Woebot, Wysa and Sonia.
Hutter of Learn Capital said that he believed that it would be possible to take manualized therapeutic approaches that have been proven to work and use that data to build a product.
"The reason why this product makes sense in today's world is that LLM revolution allows computational intelligence to communicate with humans in a way to unlock product psychological transformation," Hutter said.
"What we care about at Learn Capital is how we bring things that can transform human beings to do what they can possibly do with their potential at scale."
Both Hutter and the co-founders of Feeling Great emphasized that therapy, at times, is unaffordable and your therapist can't always be available to you. They argued that the app is ever-present and can aid you, even if you are consulting a therapist.
Eventually, the company wants to develop an app that works on clinical conditions and submit it for FDA approval. In 2022, Calm also started a clinical offering of its own.
Feeling Great is also working on introducing new features to its app, including voice-based AI, long-term memory and an anonymous mode.
Feeling Great, which is available both on Android and iOS, will be available only to U.S. customers at launch. It is free to try for seven days, and then it will cost you $99 per year.
