This California-based Startup is Developing Smarter Mental Healthcare Infrastructure Using Machine Learning And Voice Biomarkers

While one out of every five persons in the United States suffers from mental illness, only around half (43%) receive treatment (SAMHSA, 2019). Only 47.3 percent of the time, general practitioners can detect depression. Clinical depression that goes untreated is a major condition. Untreated depression raises the chances of dangerous behaviors like drug or alcohol abuse. It can also destroy relationships and cause lower worker productivity.

Kintsugi, a Techstars United Healthcare portfolio business, tries to close mental health gaps by using advanced machine learning to leverage speech biomarkers to detect depression and anxiety signs. The technology uses short snippets of people’s speech to evaluate them for indicators of mental health issues while anonymizing their information.

KiVA, a voice biomarker API platform by Kintsugi, as a clinical decision support tool that integrates seamlessly with clinical call centers, telehealth platforms, and remote patient monitoring apps to provide practitioners with real-time scoring on patients’ mental health. The company claims that its technology detects voice biomarkers for indicators of depression and anxiety based on how patients speak rather than natural language processing, resulting in language-agnostic machine learning models. Healthcare companies have already begun to adopt it, and it is expected to be used on millions of patient phone calls by the end of 2022.

Kintsugi is seeking to provide the scientific and healthcare communities with high-fidelity mental health population insights from its uniquely extensive and constantly evolving global dataset, in addition to its enterprise and consumer product offerings. The dataset is 110 times larger than the next largest, allowing researchers to better detect and comprehend indications of mental illness across populations, geographies, social determinants of health, and languages and establish a new benchmark for objectively evaluating mental health.

The company has raised $20 million in Series A funding, raising the total amount to $28 million since its creation in 2019. Acrew Capital, Darling Ventures, Citta Capital, Side Door Ventures, Primetime Partners, IT Farm, AngelList Fund, and Alpha Edison participated in the round. The funding was led by Global venture capital and Insight Partners. Kintsugi will use the funds to expand its lead in detecting indicators of mental health disorders across the various health organizations in the United States and overseas.

Reference:

• https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/kintsugi-banks-20m-scale-voice-biomarker-based-mental-health-tech
• https://kintsugihello.com/
• https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kintsugi

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