Jimini Health has raised $17 million in seed funding to scale Sage, a clinically supervised AI chatbot designed to support mental health patients between therapy sessions. The round, led by M13 and joined by Town Hall Ventures, LionBird, Zetta Venture Partners, and OneMind, brings total funding to over $25 million.
Unlike consumer chatbots such as ChatGPT, Sage operates under direct clinician oversight. It follows pre-approved care plans, never improvises, and alerts therapists in real time when a patient shows signs of crisis.
The company targets more than 5.4 million Americans-primarily adolescents and young adults-who currently turn to unregulated AI tools for mental health guidance. Data shows ChatGPT identifies over one million weekly conversations involving suicidal intent.
M13 partner Morgan Blumberg called the reliance on general-purpose AI a systemic gap: "When a product never designed for mental health is handling a million crisis conversations a week, it’s not an edge case-it’s a public health failure."
Jimini sells Sage to healthcare providers, integrating with electronic health records to enable seamless clinician access to patient interactions.
The funding arrives as CMS and the FDA have launched coordinated programs-ACCESS and TEMPO-to accelerate safe clinical AI adoption.
While debates about AI in mental health continue, Jimini argues that supervised intervention is no longer optional-it’s essential.