Hi friend,

It was a quieter week on the commercial front - no mega-rounds or acquisitions.

But there’s lots of interesting product and research news to report (don’t miss the research on outpatient mental health usage).

Let’s get into it.

⏺️ Bliss raised a €233K angel round to build culturally aware AI for therapy. The Albanian-Finnish startup is developing a therapy platform that uses AI to better reach underserved linguistic and cultural communities. (link)

⏺️ Ketim Technologies received $200K to develop a predictive blood test for postpartum depression. The funding from the Advance Queensland Female Founders Co-Investment Fund will support validation of a biomarker panel and development of a prototype. (link)

⏺️ Lyra launched a mental health toolkit for employees with chronic conditions. The offering reflects growing interest in comorbidity-aware mental health solutions, moving beyond generic EAP-style provision. Lyra also became Workday's preferred mental health partner this week, embedding its services directly into Workday’s platform and expanding its enterprise reach. (link)

⏺️ Blueprint launched its AI-assisted EHR. The mental health-focused EHR combines standard clinical and billing functionality with an AI assistant designed to reduce therapist admin burden. The pricing model is interesting - the product is available for free but charges for every session the AI assistant “works” on, starting at $0.99. Sidenote: I thought the comms on this product release were very good - authentic content from the founder with clear messages around why we should care. (link)

⏺️ Motif Neurotech launched a new TRD patient registry. The registry aims to connect people with treatment-resistant depression to future clinical trial opportunities. (link)

⏺️ GlobalMed announced a partnership with Canary Speech for vocal biomarker-based behavioural health diagnostics. The integration adds voice-based AI screening to GlobalMed's telehealth infrastructure, advancing passive mental health assessment in clinical settings. (link)

⏺️ Cope Notes secured a contract with UnitedHealthcare and Optum. The mental health text service will reach thousands of Medicaid recipients in Florida. (link)

⏺️ Monument Therapeutics dosed its first patient in a clinical trial of MT1988 for clinical high-risk psychosis. The 150-person placebo-controlled study will evaluate MT1988's potential to improve cognitive symptoms before full psychosis onset. (link)

⏺️ Alongside published a white paper on AI safety for wellness chatbots. The paper describes their AI safety evaluation approach called SURE. It’s interesting work, but is one more safety framework for builders to consider. I strongly believe we need to convene around a smaller number of AI frameworks and collaborate to improve them instead of building new ones. (link)

⏺️ Wellcome Trust announced a new Mental Health Award opening mid-April. The award will fund mechanistically informed trials of physical activity and circadian-based interventions for anxiety and depression in young people aged 10–18, with grants of £1–4M per project over 3-4 years. Applications open in April. (link)

⏺️ Australia's under-16 social media ban shows partial impact on usage. Three months after restrictions came into effect, new data suggests that over 20% of Australians aged 13–15 are still using Snapchat and TikTok. Snapchat usage in that age group has fallen 13.8 percentage points to 20.3% and TikTok usage has dropped 5.7 points to 21.2%. The ban is drawing global attention as other governments consider similar measures, but the data raises questions about the effectiveness of age-verification as an enforcement mechanism. I find this area so difficult to navigate. It’s clear that kids can find ways around bans, but it’s also convenient for Big Tech to have a narrative that bans are impossible to enforce. It’s a very complex situation. (link)

If you find these updates valuable and would like even deeper insights on mental health innovation, consider becoming a Hemingway Pro member.

As a member, you’ll join a community over 390 mental health leaders and get access to exclusive content, events and resources. We have in-person events in NYC, SF and Sydney with more coming to London, Chicago and DC soon. We are also hosting online, expert led events with leaders like Headspace CCO Jenna Glover, Dana Udall PhD and more.

⏺️ Limbic published a groundbreaking study in Nature on AI in CBT delivery. They found found that LLMs augmented with Limbic's cognitive layer scored 43% higher than standalone AI models on the Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale and consistently outperformed human therapists across all clinical quality measures. Users reported therapeutic alliance with the AI agents statistically indistinguishable from human therapists. In real-world data, users with the highest exposure to the cognitive layer recovered at a rate of 52% versus 33% for those with the lowest. There’s lots of good data, insights and nuance in the study so I’d encourage you to read it. I wrote my own breakdown of the study here. (link)

⏺️ Texting daily with a random human peer reduced loneliness more effectively than a highly supportive AI chatbot. A 296-person RCT published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology compared chatting with an AI chatbot, texting a human and journalling. Interacting with the chatbot did not yield the same psychological benefits as interacting with a randomly selected first-year university student. In fact, participants who interacted with the chatbot reported similar levels of loneliness at the end of the two-week study compared to those who simply wrote a sentence about their day. (link)

⏺️ CBT chatbots produce moderate reductions in depression symptoms, per a meta-analysis of 29 RCTs. Effect sizes were modest, but the breadth of evidence supports chatbots as a scalable, if supplementary, mental health intervention. (link)

⏺️ A self-guided digital CBT intervention significantly reduced ADHD symptoms in adults in a 337-person RCT. (link)

⏺️ LLM-based mental health chatbot research still lacks evaluation rigour and ethical safeguards, despite rapid development. A systematic review of 20 studies found frequent use of GPT models but significant methodological immaturity. (link)

⏺️ A meta-regression of 169 trials identified the active ingredients in effective mental health apps. Published in npj Digital Medicine, the findings offer a rare evidence-based framework for app development. Activity scheduling, stimulus control, and desensitisation were most strongly linked to depression improvement. Exposure-based techniques worked best for anxiety. Apps with more active ingredients tended to work better overall. The most commonly used elements - psychoeducation, relaxation and mindfulness - were effective but not the most powerful.. (link)

⏺️ 12% of US adults receive outpatient mental health care. A national survey of nearly 40,000 US adults found that approximately 12% of adults annually received outpatient mental health care. Breaking this down, 3.3% receive pure telemental health care, 2.6% hybrid care, and 6.1% all in-person mental health care. The uninsured, unemployed and those living in remote areas receive proportionally less care. (link)

⏺️ 81% of physicians now use AI professionally, up from 38% in 2023. (link)

⏺️ Minoritised youth want compassionate, identity-aware mental health apps — but distrust AI and fear data misuse. Co-design workshops with 17 adolescents from lower-income Dutch Moroccan backgrounds found youth valued apps for short-term stress relief but flagged "fake" AI support, lack of transparency, and scheduling mismatches as key barriers. (link)

⏺️ Helus Pharma (previously Cybin) reported mixed Phase2a results for their intramuscular deuterated DMT analog for generalised anxiety disorder. (link)

⏺️ Each 1°C of US warming is projected to add roughly one additional anxiety or depression symptom-day, per person per year. A Lancet Planetary Health study estimated total US economic burden from climate-attributable mental health morbidity at $24–$104B+ annually, with the greatest burden falling on low-income communities and Appalachia. (link)

That’s all for this week.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve Duke

Founder of Hemingway