Slingshot AI publicly launched Ash, the first AI designed for therapy, alongside an extension of its Series A bringing total funding to $93 million, co-led by Radical Ventures and Forerunner Ventures, and unveiled a clinical advisory board led by former NIMH director Dr. Thomas Insel.
Slingshot AI announced the public launch of Ash, which it bills as the first AI designed for therapy, after 18 months of development and a 50,000-person beta. The release also extended the company's Series A, co-led by Radical Ventures and Forerunner Ventures with prior investors a16z, Felicis, and Menlo, bringing total funding to $93 million. Ash launched as a free iOS and Android app. Unlike general-purpose assistants "designed to tell users what they want to hear," Ash is built on a special-purpose foundation model for psychology trained in three phases: pretraining on one of the largest, most diverse behavioral health datasets across modalities like CBT, DBT, ACT, and psychodynamic therapy; clinical fine-tuning; and reinforcement learning from conversation signals. Slingshot also unveiled an Expert and Clinical Advisory Board to ensure safety and clinical grounding, including former NIMH director Dr. Thomas Insel, former California Surgeon General Dr. Devika Bhushan, and former Congressman Patrick Kennedy. Insel called Ash a "high-quality, evidence-based" intervention for those "who have nowhere else to turn."
