OpenAI Startup Fund and Arianna Huffington’s Behavioral Change Technology Platform Thrive Global announced the launch of a new company, Thrive AI Health, to expand access to personalized behavior change health coaching using generative AI.
Thrive AI Health offers AI-based personalized health coaches that help scale behavioral change in five areas: connection, sleep, fitness, stress management, and food. The company touts its coaches as a tool for disease prevention and treatment optimization.
AI-based coaches will leverage: OpenAI and Thrive Global’s behavior change methodology. Trained on peer-reviewed science, users’ personal preferences and goals, biometrics, lab and other medical data.
Coaches generate personalized insights and provide users with nudges and recommendations related to five key behaviors.
OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global will be lead investors in the company, and the Alice L. Walton Foundation will be a strategic investor.
Thrive AI Health’s CEO will be former product leader DeCarlos Love. Google. He led sensors, AI and machine learning algorithms, and health and fitness experiences across all Google devices and platforms. Prior to joining Google, Love held product roles at Apple and Athos.
Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe, Professor and Director of Population Health and Medicine at NYU Langone’s Institute for Excellence in Health Equity, will serve as Thrive AI Health’s Health Equity Advisor.
The startup has also established a research partnership with the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. Stanford University School of Medicine and the Rockefeller Institute for Neuroscience at West Virginia University are all launch partners.
“Recent advances in artificial intelligence provide an unprecedented opportunity to make behavioral change much more powerful and sustainable,” Love said in a statement.
“Thrive AI Health Coach is a product that addresses the limitations of current AI and LLM-based solutions by providing personalized, proactive, and data-driven coaching across five daily behaviors. This will improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, and have a significant impact on chronic disease worldwide.”
The bigger trend
Experts say preventive treatment largely depends on behavior. And whether it’s someone’s self-care habits, knowing what’s good for them to stay healthy or not get sick more, AI can help address behavioral tendencies that can help patients change the way they take care of themselves.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York, Thrive Global provides employers with science-based behavior change software aimed at improving productivity and employee health.
Thrive Global raised $30 million in funding within a year of launching, 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 give employees wellness tools built into their workflows.
Other companies in the behavioral health space include Pennsylvania-based NeuroFlow acquired behavioral digital health company Owl in June to expand its measurement-based offerings to help providers identify and manage behavioral treatment needs.
In April, a teletherapy company Talkspace has launched the Behavioral Health Consortium, a service that allows clinicians to refer insured members who need serious treatment to in-network specialty treatment providers for alcoholism, drug use, and eating disorders.
