Siggy Raises $6M Pre-Seed to Deploy AI-Powered Mental-Health Platform
The New York startup, founded by ex-Nurx and Journey Clinical CEOs, will use AI check-ins and wearable data to bridge gaps between therapists and prescribers.
Siggy announced a $6 million pre-seed round led by Village Global, marking its first external financing. The capital will fund additional clinicians, engineering talent, software development and regulatory work as the company prepares to scale its AI-driven mental-health service. Co-founders Jonathan Sabbagh, former Journey Clinical CEO, and Edvard Engesæth, co-founder of Nurx, bring experience building digital health platforms that deliver care outside traditional offices.
The startup’s product begins with a free AI conversation that gathers a patient’s psychiatric history. After the intake, a licensed clinician conducts a video appointment, reviews the AI-collected data, makes a diagnosis and, when appropriate, prescribes medication. Between visits, patients can interact with the AI daily, reporting sleep, mood, medication adherence and physical sensations. Those inputs are combined with data from connected wearables such as Whoop, Oura or Apple Watch to generate a daily “Siggy Score” out of 100, visible to both patient and clinician. A change in the score triggers an alert for the clinician to review, and patients receive weekly check-ins for the first eight weeks of treatment.
Siggy positions itself as a supplement rather than a replacement for existing therapy. Patients may continue seeing their current therapists while using the platform, and a planned feature will let users share information with other providers and involve family members. The service does not prescribe controlled substances and is not a crisis line. It accepts commercial insurance nationwide and is expanding into government programs; insured patients’ out-of-pocket costs vary by plan. The founders also committed to keeping the service free for veterans.
Sabbagh’s interest in mental-health care stems from his own experience with burnout, PTSD and ketamine-assisted therapy, which led him back to school for psychology and later to co-found Journey Clinical. He remains executive chairman of Journey while serving as Siggy’s CEO. Engesæth, a physician-trained investor in Journey, previously built Nurx into a platform that served more than two million patients and achieved an annual revenue run rate above $100 million before merging with Thirty Madison in 2022. Their shared history of creating accessible digital health solutions attracted investors who had backed them before.
The round includes several repeat backers: Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, Mercury co-founder Immad Akhund, and Cityblock Health co-founder Toyin Ajayi via Coalition Operators, alongside PsyMed Ventures, Mystic Ventures and Gokul Rajaram. Village Global’s Amrit Rao highlighted the founders’ proven ability to launch insurance-based health products as a key factor in the investment.
Looking ahead, Siggy plans to use the funding to hire more clinicians and engineers, finalize its regulatory filings and conduct a paid-patient pilot before a broader public launch. The company’s longer-term ambition, noted by investor Akhund, is to leverage AI to detect early changes in brain health, potentially enabling pre-emptive interventions. How quickly the platform can demonstrate clinical efficacy and secure wider insurer adoption will determine whether its AI-enhanced model can reshape the fragmented landscape of mental-health care.