Slingshot AI Debuts Ash, Its Generative AI Therapy Chatbot, Backed by $93M in Funding

Slingshot AI, the a16z-backed mental health startup, has unveiled its first major product: a generative AI therapy chatbot named Ash. Emerging nearly 18 months after the company’s founding, Ash was field-tested with about 50,000 beta users before its public release.

To support this launch, Slingshot has raised an additional $50 million in funding—led by Radical Ventures and Forerunner Ventures—bringing the company’s total financing to around $93 million.

Slingshot was co-founded by Daniel Cahn (CEO), an AI engineer, and Neil Parikh (COO), known for co-founding Casper. The AI behind Ash is built on Slingshot’s own foundation model tailored specifically for psychology—not just adapted from general-purpose models. It was developed through three rigorous training phases:

• Pre-training on one of the largest behavioral health datasets, learning therapeutic styles like CBT, DBT, ACT, psychodynamic therapy, and motivational interviewing.
• Fine-tuning by Slingshot’s clinical team to capture therapeutic nuances—like when to challenge a user or conclude a session.
• Reinforcement learning to personalize and evolve responses for each user over time.

Slingshot has also assembled an Expert & Clinical Advisory Board of distinguished mental health professionals, including Dr. Thomas Insel (former director, National Institute of Mental Health), Dr. Devika Bhushan (former Surgeon General of California), Dr. Mark Ungless, Patrick Kennedy, Patricia Arean, and Mahmoud Khedr.

“Mental healthcare needs innovation…innovations like Ash hold promise not only for broadening access but delivering evidence-based therapy,” remarked Dr. Insel. Reflecting on the emotional power of language, Dr. Derrick Hull—Slingshot’s Clinical R&D Lead—added: “With Ash, we’re not trying to replicate traditional therapy…we’re creating something new.”