Kintsugi, a vocal biomarker app that can detect depression and anxiety from 20 seconds of freeform speech, announced the close of $8 million in a seed funding round.
Acrew Capital led this round of funding with participation from Darling Ventures, Techstars, On Deck, Zoom Founder/CEO Eric Yuan, Adam Grosser, alongside former c-suite and executives from Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, Soul Cycle, Verily, Gitlab, MIT Media Lab, Pegasystems, Pindrop, and Goldman Sachs.
The company plans to use the new funds to scale its enterprise API platform KiVA, which provides screenings for payers in call centers, on telehealth platforms, through remote monitoring tools.
Kintsugi has developed a consumer-facing voice app for payors, providers, and health systems to augment clinicians with AI to identify, triage, and care for patients at scale.
Rima Seiilova-Olson, Founder/Machine Learning Scientist at Kintsugi, said: “At Kintsugi, we’ve developed a novel solution that provides a modern, highly scalable, secure, API-based platform that integrates seamlessly to existing telehealth and care management platforms to provide a more reliable measure of detection especially when used adjunctively with clinicians in patient-calls.”
Grace Chang, Founder/CEO at Kintsugi, said: “Kintsugi’s Voice Biomarker API (KiVA) nearly doubles the accuracy of depression detection in the current standard of care. Today, General Practitioners are only able to positively identify depression in 47.3% of cases. What’s worse, mental health screening only occurs in 4.2% of primary care visits, yet a majority of mental healthcare is treated by overextended primary care physicians with limited bandwidth for behavioral health screening.”
mHealth Apps raised a record $1.6 billion in venture funding in 1H 2021, a 100% increase year-over-year, according to the recently released Mercom’s 1H 2021 Digital Health Funding and M&A Report. Keep, a Beijing-based fitness app closed a Series F financing round of $360 million led by SoftBank Vision Fund.
