Insider Brief
- Slingshot AI has launched Ash, the first AI built specifically for therapy, after 18 months of development and $93M in funding from investors including Radical Ventures, Forerunner, and a16z.
- Ash uses a custom psychology foundation model trained on diverse therapeutic approaches and continuously adapts to users through reinforcement learning for deeply personalized support.
- Backed by a clinical advisory board including former NIMH head Dr. Thomas Insel, Ash aims to broaden access to evidence-based mental health care, especially for underserved populations.
PRESS RELEASE — Slingshot AI has announced the public launch of Ash, the first AI designed for therapy, in addition to an extension of Series A funding, co-led by Radical Ventures and Forerunner Ventures, joining previous investors a16z, Felicis, and Menlo, bringing the total capital raised to $93 million. After 18 months of development with 50,000 beta users, Ash is now available as a free iOS and Android app, offering deeply personalized mental health support to anyone with a phone.
“The mental health crisis affects everyone and the system is fundamentally broken — 59.2 million Americans sought therapy in 2023 and reports show that 54% of people struggling with their mental health don’t receive any kind of care at all,” said Daniel Cahn, co-founder and CEO of Slingshot. “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.”
Unlike general-purpose AI assistants designed to tell users what they want to hear, Ash is built on a special-purpose foundation model for psychology that Slingshot developed over the last 18 months. This specialized model is trained in three phases. First, the model is pre-trained using one of the largest and most diverse datasets of behavioral health data ever assembled where it learns the practice of dozens of therapeutic styles and approaches such as CBT, DBT, ACT, psychodynamic therapy, and motivational interviewing. Next, Ash is fine-tuned by Slingshot’s clinical team to help it adapt to the specific nuances of AI therapy, such as knowing when to challenge someone, when to stay silent, how to handle critical moments, and appropriate opportunities to end a conversation. Finally, Ash employs reinforcement learning to continually improve and adapt each user’s experience based on signals from the conversation. Improving from both immediate and longer-term signals allows Ash to be one of the most informed forms of support, knowing what is exactly right for each user.
The company also announced the formation of its Expert & Clinical Advisory Board, comprising globally respected mental health experts, to ensure Ash’s safety, efficacy, and clinical grounding. The board includes 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 (Psychologist and Director of Data Science, AI, and Research at Mental Health Innovations), Former Congressman Patrick Kennedy (prominent mental health advocate), Patricia Arean (Former Research Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health), and Mahmoud Khedr (Lived Experience Advocate and Mental Health Innovator).
“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 a research background in technology for mental health crisis, and co-founder and President Neil Parikh, an entrepreneur and investor who 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, a 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.”
During early testing, Ash has already begun to expand access to evidence-based tools and transform lives. “Sometimes the people in your life are just too busy,” said Vanna, an early Ash user. “During those moments, it meant so much to be able to open the app and talk to Ash. It really helped — especially when I was navigating the transition from leaving my old job to stepping into a completely new and uncertain career path.”
Ash is now available on both iOS and Android. To learn more about Ash, visit talktoash.com.
Contacts
Andrew Frawley
Communications and Marketing Lead, Slingshot AI
Press@slingshotai.com
