Wysa, a popular mental health app originally founded in India around an AI chatbot that helps users talk through their feelings, has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round to expand its business on the heels of hitting 4.5 million users in 65 countries. The all-equity round is led by India’s digital health-focused […]
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices […]
Mental health app Wysa raises $5.5M for ’emotionally intelligent’ AI It’s hard enough to talk about your feelings to a person; Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “emotionally intelligent” artificial intelligence. Wysa is an AI-powered mental health app designed by Touchkin eServices, Aggarwal’s company that currently maintains headquarters in Bangalore, Boston and London. Wysa is something like a chatbot that can respond with words of affirmation, or guide a user through one of 150 different therapeutic techniques. Wysa is Aggarwal’s second venture. The first was an elder care company that failed to find market fit, she says. Aggarwal found herself falling into a deep depression, from which, she says, the idea of Wysa was born in 2016.