US Impact Fund discovers Earkick

In response to the alarming increase in mental crisis, Earkick empowers people to measure and improve mental health in real-time. Earkick’s multi-model technology analyzes health markers, vital signs, voice, and sentiment analysis to detect early signs of mental health issues. Based on this proprietary data, Earkick interacts with the individual fully automatedly by proactively providing suggestions and generating personalized content. With this approach, Earkick aims to become a privacy-first digital self-care companion for everyone worldwide.

For the technical developments, the team has trained a multi-modal mental sentiment and emotion recognition to recognize mental health states for depression and anxiety. It also built the first “Swiss GPT”, a large language model (LLM) to “talk” to members, providing advice on various levels. Moreover, Earkick can deduct PHQ-9 (a score representing the level of depression of a patient) and GAD-7 (a score representing the level of anxiety of a patient) from the data collected. It can also create synthetic voice data for data augmentation with different moods and anxiety levels, a process that has proven to increase prediction accuracy drastically.

The Earkick Selfcare Companion app is already up and running. Karin Andrea Stephan, co-founder and COO, said, “A strategic prototype is out and gaining traction fast while we are developing the full platform.” Earkick currently serves thousands of members across the US, many of them students and young adults. More than 2,000 new members join the Earkick community every month.

Earkick impresses US investors
Intrigued by the startup’s solution, Zach Beischer, a student and investment analyst at Duke Impact Investing Group (DIIG), contacted the startup expressing his excitement about Earkick’s mission to utilize data in tracking mental health, revealed Karin. "The students running the Duke Impact Investing Group had done their research, used the Earkick solution and – known for DIIG’s commitment to investing in socially impactful products – they were particularly impressed by the potential of Earkick’s technology to tackle the current global mental health crisis”, she added.

DIIG eventually invested an undisclosed amount in Earkick. As the first and only undergraduate-run impact fund at Duke University, DIIG offers more than just financial support to selected ventures; it gives portfolio companies access to top-notch consultants and mentors to help bring their companies to the next level.

To date, the startup has closed a pre-seed round of $1M in October 2021 and a SAFE note of $470k in 2023. The fundraising journey for the Seed round has started. Founded in 2021, Earkick has offices in the US and Switzerland, counting eight employees with deep ML, AI, and mental health expertise.

(RAN)