NEW YORK — In an era where digital health innovations continually promise to disrupt traditional medical paradigms, a new mental health startup is taking direct aim at one of the industry’s most glaring structural inefficiencies: the vast, often dangerous communication vacuum that exists between a patient’s clinical appointments.
Siggy, a New York-based mental health platform leveraging artificial intelligence to collect comprehensive patient histories and monitor real-time progress, has officially emerged from stealth mode with $6 million in pre-seed funding. The exclusive financing round was led by Village Global, drawing a roster of prominent angel investors and institutional backers, including Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, Mercury co-founder Immad Akhund, Cityblock Health co-founder Toyin Ajayi through Coalition Operators, PsyMed Ventures, Mystic Ventures, and Gokul Rajaram.
The startup is helmed by a powerhouse duo of health-tech veterans: Jonathan Sabbagh, co-founder of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy network Journey Clinical, and Dr. Edvard Engesæth, co-founder of the digital healthcare pioneer Nurx. Having officially commenced development in late 2025, Siggy has already begun onboarding paying patients ahead of its broader public launch. The newly acquired capital will be strategically deployed to scale its engineering and clinical teams, refine its proprietary software stack, and navigate complex regulatory requirements across national healthcare landscapes.
Executive Overview: Solving the "Blind Spot" in Psychiatric Care
For millions of individuals managing mental health conditions, the standard course of treatment is fragmented by design. A patient might see a talk therapist weekly, but their psychiatric medication prescriber—the clinician responsible for monitoring side effects, evaluating efficacy, and adjusting dosages—is often seen only once every few months. This architectural divide leaves a massive operational blind spot. Symptoms evolve, adverse drug reactions emerge, and subtle lifestyle or physiological shifts go unnoticed until a scheduled appointment arrives.
Siggy seeks to fundamentally eradicate this clinical dead zone. By blending conversational artificial intelligence, daily behavioral check-ins, and biometric data pulled directly from wearable health devices, Siggy acts as an active conduit between patients and licensed providers.
Rather than replacing human clinicians, the platform utilizes AI to shoulder the administrative burden of history-taking and symptom-tracking. The result is a continuous feedback loop that grants psychiatrists and nurse practitioners a holistic, high-resolution view of a patient’s lived reality in real-time, allowing for proactive interventions long before a crisis manifests.
Detailed Chronology: The Journey to Siggy
The creation of Siggy is the culmination of decades of personal adversity, clinical expertise, and successful serial entrepreneurship.
The Personal Catalyst
Jonathan Sabbagh’s journey into the mental health sector was forged in the crucible of his own lived experience. After spending two decades climbing the high-pressure ranks of the financial sector, Sabbagh suffered a severe burnout episode, which ultimately culminated in a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) stemming from childhood trauma.
Following a transformative recovery facilitated by ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, Sabbagh experienced a profound career pivot. At age 38, he returned to school to study psychology. Recognizing the immense operational hurdles therapists and prescribers faced in coordinating care, he co-founded Journey Clinical, a platform supporting medical practices offering psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. (Sabbagh currently serves as Journey Clinical’s executive chairman while stepping into the role of CEO at Siggy.)
A Proven Health-Tech Pedigree
On the operational side, Sabbagh found his ideal co-founder in Dr. Edvard Engesæth. A physician by training, Engesæth had served as an early investor and advisor during the foundational phases of Journey Clinical.
Long before teaming up with Sabbagh on Siggy, Engesæth made waves in telemedicine as the co-founder of Nurx, a direct-to-consumer digital health company that initially streamlined access to birth control prescriptions and home delivery. Under his leadership, Nurx scaled rapidly, amassing a patient base exceeding 2 million individuals and crossing an annual revenue run rate of $100 million prior to its strategic merger with Thirty Madison in 2022.
Having informally discussed launching a venture together for years, Sabbagh and Engesæth formally incorporated Siggy in late 2025. Their shared ambition: to build an intelligent, accessible infrastructure that scales the type of close, continuous clinical coordination Sabbagh wished he had access to during his own recovery.
Supporting Context & Mechanics: How Siggy Works
Siggy’s technical architecture is built upon a multi-layered approach to patient onboarding, ongoing monitoring, and clinical decision-making.
1. The Intake and Initial Evaluation
The patient experience begins with an accessible, free conversational AI interface. Instead of filling out cumbersome, static medical history forms in a waiting room, patients engage in a guided AI dialogue that systematically compiles their psychiatric history, symptom baselines, and past treatment experiences.
Once this comprehensive history is synthesized, the patient is connected with a licensed clinician via a secure video appointment. The clinician reviews the AI-compiled dossier, confirms diagnoses, and establishes a medical treatment plan, which may include medication management where clinically appropriate. Notably, Siggy explicitly does not prescribe controlled substances, nor does it function as an emergency crisis intervention service.
2. The "Siggy Score" and Wearable Integration
Once treatment is underway, Siggy’s core differentiator kicks in: continuous between-visit tracking.
Patients participate in daily check-ins, logging qualitative data regarding their mood, sleep quality, physical sensations, and medication adherence. To add objective clinical rigor to these self-reports, patients have the option to connect popular consumer wearables, such as devices from Whoop, Oura, or Apple.
By aggregating passive biometric data—including resting heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and detailed sleep architecture—with active daily check-ins, Siggy’s proprietary algorithms compute a daily "Siggy Score" out of 100. This composite metric is visible to both the patient and their clinician.
The clinical utility of this scoring system lies in its predictive capability. For instance, the algorithm is designed to flag physiological red flags early—such as detecting a sharp decline in sleep quality or disruptions in HRV even when a patient textually reports feeling "fine." When the Siggy Score shifts dramatically, the software automatically flags the file for clinical review. Additionally, patients receive mandatory weekly check-in prompts during their first eight weeks of treatment.
3. Care Coordination and Ecosystem Compatibility
Crucially, Siggy is not designed to operate as an isolated silo. Sabbagh emphasizes that patients can seamlessly continue seeing their existing standalone talk therapists while utilizing Siggy for psychiatric medication management and monitoring. Future product roadmaps include interoperability features that will allow patients to securely share their progress metrics with other external providers and, optionally, involve trusted loved ones in their care network.
Economic Access: Insurance Integration and Veteran Care
A foundational tenet of Siggy’s corporate strategy is equitable access. Too often, technology-driven mental health innovations debut as cash-only luxury services, shutting out lower-income demographics and those reliant on traditional reimbursement models.
Dr. Engesæth and the founding team prioritized institutional payer integration from day one. Siggy currently accepts commercial health insurance across all 50 U.S. states and is actively expanding its footprint into government-sponsored insurance programs. For patients utilizing commercial plans, out-of-pocket costs vary by individual policy, while direct-pay options remain available for those who prefer them.
In a powerful nod to public service, the founders confirmed that Siggy’s core platform and monitoring services will be permanently free to military veterans, addressing a demographic suffering from disproportionately high rates of trauma and systemic care fragmentation.
Official Statements and Investor Perspectives
The broader venture capital ecosystem has responded enthusiastically to Siggy’s thesis, driven largely by the founders’ proven operational track records and the company’s ambitious approach to AI-enabled psychiatry.
Amrit Rao, a general partner at Village Global who spearheaded the lead investment, underscored the importance of the founders’ pedigree and business model:
"The depth of healthcare operational experience Jonathan and Edvard bring to the table is rare for a pre-seed team. Pairing an ambitious, AI-driven clinical vision with an insurance-based model makes this company’s mission about true systemic access as much as it is about advanced technology."
Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, who participated in the funding round as a repeat backer of both founders, pointed to Siggy’s long-term scientific horizon:
"What excites me most about what Jonathan and Edvard are building is the long-term vision. They aren’t just building another telehealth app; they are laying the groundwork to use AI to truly understand brain health at a granular level, enabling us to detect neurological and psychiatric shifts long before they become acute crises. That’s why I’m backing them again with Siggy, and why I’m thrilled to be in early on what they build next."
Future Outlook: The Road Ahead
As Siggy transitions from its private beta phase toward a full public rollout, the company faces both immense opportunity and rigorous regulatory scrutiny. The mental health technology landscape is littered with failed startups that struggled to prove clinical efficacy, protect patient data privacy under HIPAA, or maintain sustainable unit economics within the labyrinthine U.S. insurance reimbursement framework.
However, by pairing veteran health-tech leadership with a novel architecture that bridges the dangerous chasm between weekly therapy and quarterly psychiatric check-ins, Siggy is positioning itself at the vanguard of the next generation of behavioral health.
With $6 million in fresh capital secured, an insurance-backed reimbursement engine up and running, and an advanced biometric tracking ecosystem deployed, Siggy enters the market not merely as a digital tracker, but as a serious contender to rewrite the standard of care for modern psychiatric treatment.
