OpenAI Startup Fund and Arianna Huffington’s Behavior Change Technology Platform Thrive Global announced that the two are founding a new company, Thrive AI Health, to expand access to personalized behavior-change health coaching using generative AI.
Thrive AI Health provides an AI-enabled personalized health coach to help scale behavioral change in five areas: connection, sleep, fitness, stress management, and diet. The companies tout the coach as a tool for disease prevention and treatment optimization.
AI-powered coaching OpenAI and Thrive Global’s behavior change methodology, trained on peer-reviewed science, the user’s personal preferences and goals, and biometric, testing, and other medical data.
Coach generates personalized insights and provides users with advice and recommendations related to five key actions.
OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global will be the company’s lead investors, and the Alice L. Walton Foundation will be a strategic investor.
Thrive AI Health’s CEO is former product leader DeCarlos Love. Google. He led sensors, artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, and health and fitness experiences across all Google devices and platforms. Prior to Google, he held product roles at Apple and Athos.
Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe, director of the Health Equity Institute at NYU Langone and professor of population health medicine, will serve as a health equity advisor for Thrive AI Health.
Additionally, the startup has a research partnership with the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. The Stanford University School of Medicine and the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University are initiating partners in the project.
“Recent advances in artificial intelligence offer unprecedented opportunities to make behavior change more powerful and sustainable,” Love said in a statement.
“Thrive AI Health Coach addresses the limitations of current AI and LLM-based solutions by providing personalized, proactive, data-driven coaching across five daily behaviors, which will improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs and have a profound impact on chronic disease around the world.”
Larger trends
Experts say preventive care relies largely on behavior It can also tell you about your self-care habits, such as whether you are aware of what is good for you to stay healthy or prevent your illness from getting worse. AI can help address your patients’ behavioral trends and change the way they take care of themselves.
Founded in 2016, New York-based Thrive Global provides employers with evidence-based behavior change software aimed at improving productivity and employee wellness.
Thrive Global secured $30 million in funding a year after it was founded and raised $80 million in Series C funding in 2021.
The company currently has offices in New York, San Francisco, Melbourne, Dublin, Bucharest and Athens.
In 2022, Thrive partnered with cloud customer experience company Genesys to help organizations provide employees with wellbeing tools that are embedded into organizational workflows.
Other companies in the behavioral health space include Pennsylvania-based company NeuroFlow acquired fellow behavioral digital health company Owl in June to expand its measurement-based services to help providers identify and manage behavioral care needs.
In April, a telemedicine company Talkspace launched Behavioral Health Consortium, a service that can refer insured members with emergency needs to in-network specialty providers for treatment of alcoholism, drug use and eating disorders.
