Siggy, an AI-enabled virtual mental health provider, has launched out of stealth with $6 million in pre-seed funding.
Siggy aims to build a complete mental health system that delivers continuous, personalized care. It combines therapy, prescription management and AI for intake and between-visits support. Intake is free; patients only pay if they accept treatment. Siggy is backed by Village Global, alongside several angel investors.
Patients begin with a free, anonymous conversation with Siggy’s AI that doesn’t require an account or login. It remembers everything, so patients don’t have to repeat their history when they eventually see a provider. An AI-powered preliminary diagnosis is reviewed by clinicians and a patient is presented with treatment options. After a call with a human provider, patients log into Siggy to add existing providers or relatives to the system and confirm their treatment goals.
If a patient accepts treatment, they see a human clinician monthly with the option of engaging with Siggy’s AI between visits, which draws on their full history. Siggy’s therapy AI agent does not answer medical questions, instead directing them to human providers. It can help patients work through their goals, remind them of specific exercises and be a general sounding board. There are also safety protocols in place to flag higher-acuity needs to human providers.
Siggy can connect to wearables and offers a one-minute daily check-in on sleep, mood, how the body feels and medication side effects. These data combined form the Siggy Score, a single number out of 100 that patients and their clinicians see every day. When Siggy sees a pattern building, it flags the change to the patient’s clinician with the context behind it. Weekly check-ins in the first two months of treatment let clinicians decide whether to hold a dose, increase it or change a medication.
“It can build a really detailed picture of you rather fast, and the idea is if there are behavior patterns that are recurrent…[Siggy can] begin to help people gain agency and recognize them before they happen,” Siggy co-founder and CEO Jonathan Sabbagh told Fierce Healthcare.
Sabbagh co-founded Siggy with Edvard Engesaeth, M.D., now COO, an early Journey Clinical investor who co-founded Nurx. Siggy’s chief medical officer is Daniel Montville, M.D., a Mayo Clinic-trained psychiatrist. Sabbagh previously worked for two decades in finance, before finding out he was living with chronic burnout and undiagnosed PTSD from childhood trauma.
Sabbagh sought psychedelic-assisted therapy and went back to school to study psychology, before dropping out to co-found Journey Clinical, a large psychedelic-assisted therapy network in the U.S. with over 3,000 practices. “I saw a real gap where people drop off treatments, they don’t have continuous care,” Sabbagh told Fierce Healthcare.
About 16% of American adults take antidepressants, and a fifth annually drop out before completing the recommended course of treatment. “Prescriptions aren’t the problem…it really is a fragmented system where you don’t have therapists ever speaking with your prescriber,” Sabbagh said.
Siggy can prescribe medications, except controlled substances. Clinicians will taper patients off medications when they are ready. Longer-term, Siggy hopes to be able to identify other conditions through analytics on speech, labs, genetic testing and biomarkers, such as diabetes or ALS. It also hopes to build out neural datasets to support clinical trials for technologies like brain implants.
Siggy is covered by major commercial payers in all 50 states, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, UnitedHealthcare and Humana. It also takes Medicaid, Medicare, TRICARE and is free for veterans.
“Our goal is to provide continuous care for life. We don’t really see meds as a feature. It is a combination of building persistent AI identity, being able to track progress and to make essentially personalized decisions that very few could afford,” Sabbagh said.