Siggy raised $6M to run AI check-ins between mental health visits

A patient on antidepressants often sees a therapist each week. The clinician who writes their medication sees them for a few minutes every few months. Jonathan Sabbagh and Edvard Engesæth want to put an AI in that gap. Their New York company, Siggy, has raised $6 million in pre-seed funding. Crunchbase News reported the round in an exclusive on Thursday.

Village Global led the round. Mary Ann Azevedo at Crunchbase News names several investors who had backed the two founders before. They include Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures and Mercury co-founder Immad Akhund. Cityblock Health co-founder Toyin Ajayi joined through her firm Coalition Operators. PsyMed Ventures, Mystic Ventures and Gokul Rajaram also took part. The founders told Crunchbase News the money will pay for more clinicians and engineers. Some will go on work the regulator needs. It is the company's first outside funding.

What Siggy does

A patient starts with a free AI conversation that collects their history. They then meet a licensed clinician on video. The clinician reviews what the AI gathered, makes a diagnosis, and prescribes medication if needed. Between visits, the patient can talk to Siggy's AI. They also file a short daily report on sleep, mood, medication and how they feel.

Siggy pulls data from a connected wearable. A Whoop, an Oura ring, or an Apple Watch can feed in sleep, activity, and heart rate. The output is a daily score out of 100. Both the patient and the clinician can see it. When the score shifts, the software asks a clinician to look. New patients also get weekly check-ins for the first eight weeks, the founders said.

Two limits on the service, the founders told Crunchbase News. Siggy's clinicians will not prescribe controlled substances. A person in a crisis has to call someone else. A patient can keep their existing therapist while using it.

Who the founders are

Sabbagh is Siggy's CEO. He co-founded Journey Clinical before, which supports practices that offer ketamine-assisted therapy. He said he moved into mental health care after his own PTSD diagnosis in his late thirties. He stays on at Journey Clinical as its executive chairman.

Engesæth is a physician by training. He co-founded Nurx before, which started out mailing birth control to patients. He told Crunchbase News that Nurx grew to more than two million patients. It also passed $100 million in annual revenue run rate before merging with Thirty Madison in 2022. Those figures are his own, as reported by Crunchbase News.

A buyer judging the product has a clear question to ask. Siggy says the daily score helps catch a difficult week earlier. A clinician on their own only reads what one three-month visit shows. The time saved, Siggy says, makes the clinician cheaper to run. Whether that holds will show in the outcomes of the first paying patients. A funding round does not prove it. Siggy began accepting paying patients before this round. A public launch will come after further testing, the founders said.

Source

Crunchbase News: Nurx And Journey Clinical Co-Founders Raise $6M For Mental Health Startup Siggy, by Mary Ann Azevedo.