Zoe (Ziwen) Qin

What happened in mental health this week? ⏺️ Ash by Slingshot AI launched their AI-powered therapy service Ash, and closed an extension of their Series A funding round, bringing their total raise to $93M. ⏺️ AbsoluteCare raised $135M to fund their market expansion. The company provides integrated care, including physical, behavioural and social care and has a strong emphasis on value-based payment models. ⏺️ Kooth Digital Health released their half-year trading and operational update, including progress on their California contract, which appears set to meet registration targets. ⏺️ Coinbase Co-Founder Fred Ehrsam raised $100M for a BCI neurotech startup called Nudge. ⏺️ Talkspace partnered with Tia Health to integrate mental health care services into primary care for women, expanding Talkspace's specialised women's health services. ⏺️ Elon Musk's Grok launched two new AI 'companions', including a sexualized anime bot that is available for users as young as 12. Just what we needed… ⏺️ Headstream Innovation announced their 2025 Accelerator cohort of early-stage founders building tech to support young people's mental well-being. I know a few of the businesses in this cohort and think they have a lot of potential. I will be following this cohort closely. ⏺️ In the UK, NICE recommended Limbic and Wysa's Digital Referral Assistant as digital 'front door' technologies for NHS Talking Therapies assessments for anxiety and depression. ⏺️ Clerkenwell Health, the site for the UK's first sponsored LSD trial, announced that they screened the first participant for MindMed's Phase 3 study of MM120. ⏺️ Ember Mental Health announced their 2025-26 cohort, selecting 15 community-based mental health initiatives which they will support. The program received over 1,800 applications, which is wild, and frankly, I love seeing support being provided to community initiatives like these. ⏺️ Winslow Strong announced The Consciousness Foundation, a public charity aimed at advancing scientific understanding of consciousness and fostering consciousness development, including awakening, healing, and inner development. This is very relevant to our recent post on Spirit Tech - the space seems to be gaining some momentum. ⏺️ Penda Health's real-world study found that their LLM clinical copilot reduced diagnostic errors by 16% and treatment errors by 13% across 39,849 live patient visits at 15 clinics. Whilst this was focused on primary care, it points to the kind of impact that may exist when these kinds of LLMs are applied to mental health. __ 📩 Like this? I send it as a weekly email (including links and even sometimes irrelevant personal stories about my life) to thousands of mental health operators. Sign up for free here > https://lnkd.in/g9xgMW4r 👉 Follow me Steve Duke, for more insights on the #mentalhealth industry.

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We had Tom Charman (Co-founder at Blok) on Ventures, Fresh out of stealth having raised $7.5m He explains why their star-studded team is building Blok "A lot of companies aren't particularly good at predicting how their customers are going to behave, but more importantly, they're not necessarily targeting the right customer." "Most companies will optimise for short-term benefit as opposed to long-term gain - what's actually happening is in the long term they're shooting themselves in the foot." "Nine in ten experiments are failing, it's taking too long to run experiments, teams don't know which experiments to run." "If we're going to move towards a world where it's multimodal interfaces with lots of different UI, knowing what to generate for who and when is going to become significantly more difficult." You can watch the full conversation by searching "Tom Charman, Co-founder @ blok: How We're Predicting User Behaviour Before Writing Code"

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Firstly, this isn't a post about Europe vs US. They're different beasts at different stages of development… However, as a European VC, it's critical to be connected to the US VC market. If you are, on average, you'll get bigger markups for your portfolio by taking advantage of the UK/US arbitrage among other things. Two examples of this are Lawhive and StackOne from our portfolio. Both have founders who've moved to the US and both have raised from GV (Google Ventures) with deep US ties of course. Same with companies like Mimica (Khosla Ventures), Carwow (Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel) and many more. You need to be able to pick the phone up to tier 1 US VCs and get them to meet your portfolio. So when Adam Shuaib, PhD, Millan Suri and I went to SF a few weeks back, we tried to cover as much ground as we could, meeting about 40 of the tier 1 US funds like Founders Fund, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz…. It takes time to build this network but the rewards are great. As you can see, we also went surfing.

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Decade and a half ago two major changes ripped through the VC world: - rise of superangels (eventually solo GPs/seed funds) - rise of 'founder friendly' VCs (eg FF, A16Z etc) Now we have two changes again: - rise of megaVC - emergence of smaller firms practicing VC as craft + value add

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Product-market fit genuinely feels different...and it'll show up in the data Demo to close rates are the easiest thing to look at for product-market fit right now. Vertical AI startups in our portfolio are seeing 50%+ demo to close rates, even with brand new account executives selling the product. It's happening in every market from AI takeoffs to AI CSR/Voice software to AI procurement solutions. When you see a demo to close rate over 50% chances are you have a jaw dropping customer experience and you should put your foot on the gas. If you're seeing something dramatically lower in mid-market or SMB ACV categories, it's worth revisiting your product and/or your pitch.

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