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We're thrilled to announce our participation in Psyrin's $1M pre-seed round, led by 2048 Ventures and joined by Space Cadet Ventures. Psyrin is developing groundbreaking technology that uses voice biomarkers to transform how we understand and assess mental health, with their first product, Simon AI, launching today.
Mental health care faces a critical infrastructure challenge. Traditional assessment methods rely heavily on subjective observations and time-intensive interviews, creating massive bottlenecks in care delivery. With average wait times for assessments stretching up to 500 weeks in the UK, there's an urgent need for innovative solutions that help clinicians work more efficiently while maintaining high standards of care.
For individuals seeking assessment, the current system and its shortage of trained psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as high rates of misdiagnosis and ineffective treatment has led to difficulties in accessing mental health care.
Pysrin’s vision is a world where everyone tracks their mental health, just as they do their physical health. A world where the best interventions are determined using measurable signals from the brain.
Founded by a remarkable trio combining clinical, technical, and research expertise, Psyrin is pioneering the use of voice biomarkers in mental health assessment. Their first product, Simon AI, can analyse voice patterns to identify signs of neurodivergence in minutes, starting with ADHD and autism assessment.
Simon AI is not a diagnostic tool, but offers a new way to think about neurodiversity, moving away from the construct of diagnosis. Simon's AI algorithms have demonstrated impressive accuracy in identifying ADHD and autism, with overall accuracy exceeding 80% in their research studies.
Beyond this, given the use of synthesised biomarkers, short for ‘biological markers’, the tool offers a highly personalised breakdown of potential ADHD/autism likelihood, helping individuals better understand themselves, beyond what a doctor might tell them.
At Concept Ventures, we invest in exceptional founders tackling significant challenges with innovative technology. Psyrin stands out for several reasons:
Biomarkers are measurable indicators of biological states or conditions.
In the context of Simon AI, the product focuses on biomarkers related to neurodivergence and its traits, analysing over 200 biomarkers to make inferences. These can include both intuitive (loudness, sentence complexity, tone) and complex (mathematical transformations of voice) measures.
Currently, mental health assessment relies on how doctors pattern match on experience - Psyrin believes there is a better way. The thesis is as follows: mental health care needs to move beyond “diagnostic labels” and into an era of personalised treatment based on measurable signals, i.e. “biomarkers”. Hence, it is just as valuable to see these biological signals of ADHD, for example, relative to a diagnostic test.
Voice, of course, is becoming the default modality through which we interact with technology. Whether via AR, voice assistants, or AI wearables - it is integral. We’ve arguably been ‘trained’ to leverage voice since the introduction of Siri in 2011. As such, extracting emotional and mental state from voice then becomes a potent tool, for personalisation purposes, as well as for retooling care journeys.
You can read more about voice biomarkers here.
Simon AI is just the beginning of Psyrin's journey. On a broader scale, building a way to measure mental health is the key unlock for preventive care. If one can measure and predict mental states, one can step in earlier and transform health trajectories.
Their vision extends to supporting clinicians in the assessment and monitoring of serious mental illness (SMI), transforming how we approach early intervention and ongoing care.
We're excited to partner with the Psyrin team as they build the future of mental health assessment.
Access Simon AI here
Check out Psyrin here
