Limbic has raised a $14m Series A round backed by Khosla Ventures to take its product to US healthcare providers.
The London-based startup has developed an AI mental health chatbot and AI-powered clinical referral software. The chatbot is used across 33% of the UK’s NHS Talking Therapies services, which covers 260k patients.
The startup, which was founded in 2018, is the first AI mental health chatbot in the world to achieve UKCA Class IIa medical device status — an official certification that evaluates clinical effectiveness, safety and risk management.
Other investors included LGBTQIA+ investment syndicate Gaingels and Illusian, the family office of Ilkka Paananen, cofounder of game development company Supercell.
Therapy through AI
Limbic’s AI chatbot is among the latest wave of startups building AI chatbot solutions to address a widening gap between the high demand for mental health support and the lack of capacity for healthcare services across Europe.
Its chat serves as a support tool between therapy sessions, using assessment software to ask the user questions to inform real-time hypotheses about what a patient is likely to be struggling with. These insights are then sent to clinicians to inform the diagnostic process.
So far, the company says that it’s helped clinicians reclaim over 50k hours of work that would have been spent on patient assessment and referral.
Encouraging engagement
This week, its CEO Ross Harper told Sifted that the chatbot has encouraged demographics that are typically unengaged with traditional mental health support to access help. A 2023 survey of 129.4k NHS patients found the therapy services that used Limbic saw a 179% rise in non-binary individuals accessing mental health support and a 29% increase for ethnic minority groups.
When it comes to incorporating AI in mental health support, safety is a concern for some — especially when data privacy regulations mean that digital apps are restricted in what they can share about a user.
But Harper also said that Limbic’s partnership with the NHS means that clinical professionals can be notified if the chatbot flags a potential concern: “If Limbic recognises that a patient is in distress and/or in need of urgent treatment or attention, the platform immediately refers the patient to seek in-person support and alerts the healthcare provider to this as well.”
As the startup prepares to deploy its fresh funding, it will be focusing on the US market, a tempting destination for any healthtech startup due to the country’s more privatised and less fragmented healthcare industry.
