Kintsugi, a platform that uses vocal biomarkers to help identify conditions like anxiety and depression, wrapped up its seed-funding round, raising a total of $8 million.

The round was led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Darling Ventures, Techstars, On Deck and Adam Grosser, who also serves as an advisor for Kintsugi. The company received funding from the National Science Foundation and former executives from Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, Soul Cycle, Verily, Gitlab, MIT, Pegasystems, Pindrop and Goldman Sachs.

WHAT IT DOES

According to Kintsugi, its voice biomarker technology can use 20 seconds of freeform speech to pick up on anxiety and clinical depression.

"Mental healthcare practitioners are on the frontlines of a national healthcare crisis,” Founder and CEO Grace Chang said in a statement. “We empower them with advanced AI that will help them better identify and triage patients that can sometimes fall through the cracks.”

WHAT IT’S FOR

Kintsugi said the funding will allow the company to scale its enterprise API platform KiVA, which provides screenings for payers in call centers, on telehealth platforms and through remote monitoring tools.

The capital will also help achieve Kintsugi’s goal of 20 million clinician-patient calls by 2022, develop a global biomarker standard for mental health and support its clinical trials.

“Kintsugi provides a compelling innovation to leaders in healthcare focused on improving clinical outcomes,” Dr. Gerald Hautman, chief medical officer and senior vice president of national accounts at UnitedHealthcare, said in a statement. “COVID has dramatically increased our responsibility to address care at scale.”

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Kintsugi is not alone in using voice to diagnose disease; others in the space include Sonde Health and Vocalis. 

Many Americans felt their mental health took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation that used the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey data, about 41% of U.S. adults reported anxiety or depressive symptoms in January 2021.

The pandemic also pushed care to telehealth or virtual settings. Though telehealth use has begun to fall off from its peak at the height of the pandemic, demand for virtual behavioral health is still strong, according to a report by analytics firm Trilliant Health.

"Over the past 24 months, telehealth has consistently been utilized for behavioral health diagnoses more than medical diagnoses, particularly by commercially insured patients," the researchers wrote.