Mindstep

Mindstep, operating as MINDSET TECHNOLOGIES LTD, is a digital health company founded in 2017 that has developed a comprehensive platform for brain and mental health. The company was established in London, United Kingdom, by Hamzah Selim, Aaron Lin, and Itai Palmon. The founders' medical backgrounds were pivotal in the company's creation; while training as medics, they identified significant challenges patients faced in accessing mental and brain care services. Selim, a neuroscientist, and Lin, who has experience as an Executive Director at the Stanford School of Medicine, aimed to establish a new standard in cognitive healthcare. The initial inspiration for the app's technology reportedly came from the eye-tracking features used in Snapchat filters, which Selim realized could be adapted for neurological assessment.

Mindstep offers a digital therapeutics platform designed to address a range of prevalent brain conditions, including anxiety, depression, dementia, brain fog, and concussion, all within a single product. The company's business model targets both individual consumers and organizations, such as insurers, by providing an AI-based tool that assists with triage, clinical diagnosis, and treatment. For consumers, the app provides personalized assessments and self-management pathways, while for business clients like insurers, it offers a 24/7 tool to manage patient care. The platform uses clinically validated screening tools, AI analytics, and cognitive tasks to build a detailed picture of a user's cognitive health, which informs personalized therapeutic plans. This approach has been shown to be faster than traditional clinical assessments and has demonstrated convergent validity with established cognitive tests like the MMSE-2. The company has also developed its own proprietary assessment, the Mindstep Mood and Cause Examination (MMCE), designed to improve upon traditional depression screening tools for a digital setting.

Since its inception, Mindstep has achieved several key milestones, including raising approximately $5.77 million in funding. A significant seed round in December 2021, led by Octopus Ventures, secured £2.5 million ($3.4M). The company has garnered support from numerous institutional and angel investors, including Calm/Storm Ventures and Redbus Group. The application is currently available in the UK on iOS devices for users aged 18 and over. Mindstep's stated goal is to eventually partner with the UK's National Health Service (NHS) to make its services available to patients at no cost.

Keywords: digital therapeutics, cognitive health, mental health assessment, AI diagnostics, brain health, self-management, clinical screening, digital health platform, dementia risk, anxiety management, depression support, brain fog, concussion recovery, neurological health, health technology, insurtech, clinical validation, remote diagnostics, personalized healthcare, venture capital