Slingshot AI Launches Ash: First AI Designed Specifically for Therapy with $93M Funding

Slingshot AI has announced the public launch of Ash, the first AI designed specifically for therapy, now available as a free iOS and Android app. The launch comes with an extension of Series A funding co-led by Radical Ventures and Forerunner Ventures, joining previous investors a16z, Felicis, and Menlo, bringing total capital raised to $93 million. After 18 months of development with 50,000 beta users, Ash aims to provide deeply personalized mental health support to anyone with a phone.

The platform addresses a significant gap in mental healthcare accessibility. According to company data, 59.2 million Americans sought therapy in 2023, while reports indicate that 54% of people struggling with mental health don't receive any care at all. "We've built Ash from the ground up to address this need and provide a new type of support. Ash understands what real mental health support looks and feels like. Ash will challenge you and take you on a therapeutic journey, and deliver the right modality at the right time," said Daniel Cahn, co-founder and CEO of Slingshot.

Ash differentiates itself from general-purpose AI assistants through its special-purpose foundation model for psychology, developed over 18 months. The specialized model undergoes three-phase training: pre-training on one of the largest datasets of behavioral health data ever assembled, where it learns dozens of therapeutic styles including CBT, DBT, ACT, psychodynamic therapy, and motivational interviewing; fine-tuning by Slingshot's clinical team to adapt to AI therapy nuances such as knowing when to challenge users or end conversations; and reinforcement learning to continually improve each user's experience based on conversation signals.

The company has established an Expert & Clinical Advisory Board comprising globally respected mental health experts to ensure Ash's safety, efficacy, and clinical grounding. Board members include Dr. Thomas Insel (former head of the National Institutes of Mental Health from 2002-2015), Dr. Devika Bhushan (former Surgeon General of California), Dr. Mark Ungless, Former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, Patricia Arean, and Mahmoud Khedr.

"Mental healthcare needs innovation, as traditional systems have left too many people without quality care," said Dr. Thomas Insel, Clinical Advisor and former head of the National Institutes of Mental Health. "Innovations like Ash hold promise not only for broadening access but broadening access to an innovative intervention trained to deliver high-quality, evidence-based therapy. Ash has been informed by deep clinical insights, and it offers those insights to those who have nowhere else to turn."

Slingshot is led by co-founder and CEO Daniel Cahn, an experienced AI engineer with research background in technology for mental health crisis, and co-founder and President Neil Parikh, who previously co-founded and scaled Casper to $500M+ revenue and IPO.

"What we've learned from a decade of research in digital mental health is that language itself can be profoundly therapeutic. With Ash, we're not trying to replicate traditional therapy in AI form — we're creating something new," said Dr. Derrick Hull, digital mental health pioneer and Clinical R&D Lead at Slingshot AI. "By training on real therapeutic interactions and understanding what actually helps people change, we can offer support that's both deeply personalized and grounded in clinical evidence. This isn't about replacing therapists; it's about ensuring that everyone who needs help can access it, especially those who've been historically underserved by our mental health system."

Click here for the original news story.