Founded by Tony Robbins and Calm alumni, The Path hopes to provide safer AI therapy

When the founders of a men’s mental health app called Mental saw that one feature — interactive AI voice — resonated with their users, they knew they were on to something.

Thus was born the idea for a new, and hopefully safer, type of AI therapy app, which they called The Path, co-founder and CEO Anson Whitmer tells TechCrunch.

Then famous author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins became so fascinated by this startup that he joined it as a co-founder.

The Path has now raised $14.3 million in seed funding led by Prime Movers Lab (where Robbins is a partner), with participation from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, boxer Deontay Wilder, and the Designer Fund.

After the Prime Movers investment, Robbins started chatting with Whitmer and co-founder Tyler Sheaffer about small things like branding, but as his enthusiasm and ideas for the app grew, they offered to bring him on as a co-founder. The author has since helped shape “The Path” into a therapeutic application as well as a training that leverages Robbins’s famous self-improvement methods.

Whitmire, who was a former employee of the meditation app Calm alongside Shafer, says his pursuit of mental health technology stemmed from tragic experiences: When he was 19, his beloved uncle committed suicide.

This inspired Whitmire to pursue a doctorate in psychology, and he plans to go into research after graduation. But while in college, his cousin left a voicemail. “I didn’t realize it until it was too late. This was also a call for help, and he killed himself,” Whitmer recalled.

This has changed the path towards work that can communicate scientific findings to the masses. Working on Calm was a natural first step, as the research on how meditation improves mental health is strong. However, after working at Calm through 2021, Whitmire felt like he could do more.

“Even though we’ve had a big impact, it’s not a big enough impact,” he said. “The problem is that people’s problems are very personal. They’re very personal. They’re unique.”

Additionally, not everyone will ever have access to individual therapy or coaching. There aren’t enough therapists in the world for that.

Whitmire sees LLMs and artificial intelligence as the bridge that spans this gap. “What was exciting and game-changing was that, for the first time in my career, I saw that there was actually this possibility for every person to get the personal kind of access and care that they needed to really get help,” he said.

In fact, something like this is already starting to happen. OpenAI said that at least 900 million people use ChatGPT for mental health-related queries every week.

However, the problem with using consumer chatbots for mental health is that they are “optimized for engagement,” Whitmer says, which is the opposite of what therapy and coaching should do.

Consumer chatbots attempt to quickly solve problems for users, and engage in “boosting” of ideas, to encourage users to come back for more. “But therapy/coaching doesn’t work that way. You try to understand the problem deeply,” he added. The idea is to extract assumptions and then help the person discover their own solutions.

The Path’s AI is trained “to set up the structure, so that later you can get to a place where there is a solution,” but from a place of understanding, Whitmer says.

To that end, Whitmer says the startup’s specially trained AI model scored 95 on the AI ​​benchmark for mental health well-being, Vera-MH. This compares to a top score of 65 for consumer bots.

“It’s meant to challenge you,” he says. “It’s not just meant to agree with you.” In fact, he says the app model was trained post-hoc from open source models, so it doesn’t use key consumer LLMs at all, meaning it’s not just a wrapper on top of them.

Path, which lets users choose from 11 virtual AI-powered wizards and customize their preferences for routing and other details, is currently free as it gains users. Ultimately, the startup plans to charge $40 per month.