More people opened a mental health app last year than booked a therapy session, and slingshot ai…
more people opened a mental health app last year than booked a therapy session, and slingshot ai raised $93m to run ash, a companion that has quietly become one of the biggest providers by user count. wysa reports 30-50% drops in depression and anxiety scores on the phq-9 scale.
the $5,000-a-year therapist now competes with a $10-a-month bot, and nobody has drawn the liability line.
Context
Business Wire and AP (Jul 22, 2025) report Slingshot AI announced $93 million in total funding and launched Ash, which it calls the first AI designed for therapy. Forbes (Jul 22, 2025) profiles it as Casper co-founder Neil Parikh's new startup.
A Wysa randomized trial summary lists PHQ-9 for depression and GAD-7 for anxiety as primary measures, and a 2026 SAGE journal paper reports real-world testing of an AI conversational agent over 12 weeks.
The $93 million and Ash match Slingshot's release, which is dated Jul 22, 2025. The comparison that more people opened a mental health app than booked a therapy session, 'one of the biggest providers by user count', and Wysa's 30 to 50 percent drops on the PHQ-9 were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. The sources read do not give those numbers.
Related work
Watch next
- Find the Wysa PHQ-9 result and the app-versus-therapy usage statistic.
Sources
- AP News, Slingshot launches Ashapnews.com
- Wysa trial summaryblogs.wysa.io
- SAGE: real-world testing of an AI conversational agent, 2026journals.sagepub.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 2 October 2026 at 00:39 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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