In explaining its decision to co-lead Slingshot AI's $93 million round, Radical Ventures describes Ash as "a model trained from the ground up on the expertise of mental health practitioners," not a general LLM prompted to act like a therapist. The piece details a system trained on one of the largest behavioral health datasets assembled, spanning CBT, DBT, psychodynamic therapy, and motivational interviewing, and refined with reinforcement learning that strengthens the therapeutic alliance over time. Radical frames Ash against severe scarcity, roughly one provider per 10,000 people seeking support, and stresses that good therapy means "knowing when to stay silent, when to push back, and how to help someone gain a new perspective," the opposite of agreeable general chatbots. It notes a founding team led by Daniel Cahn and Neil Parikh and an advisory board including former NIMH director Thomas Insel and former congressman Patrick Kennedy.