Ellipsis Health, a company using AI voice agent technology, announced it has raised $45 million in a new Series A funding round.
Salesforce, Khosla Ventures and CVS Health Ventures led the round. Mitsui Global Investment, Collier, E12 and AME Cloud Ventures participated in the round.
The company is also introducing Sage, an AI care manager aimed at supporting patients with physical, behavioral and social needs.
WHAT IT DOES
Ellipsis Health uses vocal biomarkers to identify mental health disorders like anxiety and depression.
According to the company, Sage aims to “expand provider capacity, streamline workflows and elevate patient engagement.”
Sage leverages Ellipsis’ Empathy Engine, based on patented vocal biomarker technology and trained on millions of live clinical patient calls.
In a statement, Ellipsis said Sage is “emotionally intelligent, adjusting its tone and approach based on a patient’s emotional state and mental health needs, ensuring high levels of engagement and behavior change.”
The company will use the funds to hasten Sage’s adoption across healthcare providers, payers and care management organizations. The company is also looking to expand its AI capabilities and enhance clinical integrations.
“Sage derives the clinical understanding from our experience developing vocal biomarkers in case management conversations and builds an empathetic, longitudinal care journey by leveraging Salesforce’s Health Cloud with its clinical partners, which meets the needs of high-risk, high-cost members,” Mainul Mondal, CEO and founder of Ellipsis Health, said in a statement.
THE LARGER TREND
In 2021, Ellipsis Health raised $26 million in Series A funding. Ellipsis said the capital would be used to add more customers, grow global partnerships, build out its team and research new voice-based technology.
That same year, Cigna International launched a digital tool that evaluates a person’s stress level. The company partnered with Ellipsis Health to develop the Cigna StressWaves Test, which is touted to be the world’s first voice-activated stress test.
Cigna stated that the technology was developed over two decades of research. The AI tool’s algorithm, developed by Ellipsis Health, was trained on a dataset comprising over 15,000 adults aged 18 and above, ensuring it can cater to diverse populations with varying accents and levels of English proficiency.
Other companies in the AI voice technology space include Doctorpresso, which in 2024 developed a mental health diary app that leverages generative AI to screen for depression early while securing sensitive user data.
The mobile app, called REDI, analyzes a user’s speech patterns and provides near-real-time insights into their mental state.
Via AI, the app analyzes four voice characteristics: average pitch, pitch variability, spectral centroid and spectral roll-off.
These factors, which reportedly change as depression worsens, are used to classify users and whether they are not depressed, have mild depression or are experiencing a major depressive episode.
