Theris, an AI-powered behavioral health provider, has launched out of stealth with an update to its platform.
The startup, founded in 2023, provides care and augments it with AI tools for providers, automating clinical workflows from intake to billing. As sessions take place, AI agents record and analyze sessions, with patient consent. The AI agents can surface details from a patient’s medical record that a provider missed or flag potential medication interactions, among other capabilities.
“Our number-one goal is getting better patient outcomes,” co-founder and CEO Anthony Capone told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview.
Theris both employs behavioral health providers and has partner providers using its platform. It has seen patients since 2024 and operates across eight states, with a particular focus on memory care and substance use disorder. Among its largest clients is the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Theris extracts digital biomarkers from voice cadence and facial micro-expressions during sessions, generating treatment plan recommendations. Early data show AI-augmented sessions achieve 94% diagnostic accuracy compared to human psychology assessments, Theris claims. The platform also builds a checklist for the provider that completes automatically via transcript analysis. In cases of patient pushback, the system detects resistance and alerts the provider to adjust their approach.
(Theris)
The company’s next phase is set toward becoming an FDA Class II medical device, able to do fully autonomous psychology and psychiatry. “Our thesis is that AI-provided psychotherapy and psychiatry will be reimbursed” in the next few years by commercial and government payers, Capone said, talking about FDA-approved medical devices. This “will be an option that many patients seek, in addition to traditional human-led psychotherapy and psychiatry.”
To train providers, Theris developed an AI patient avatar that responds in real time, prompting the clinician through psychiatric intake. This helps simulate scenarios, especially important for complex patients on many medications.
Every patient gets a warning that their session is recorded to improve care and providers are also required to ask for verbal consent. Less than 1% of the time, Theris patients opt out of recording. “We’re very clear with them of how the data is used,” Capone said. The data is not shared externally and anonymized for training purposes. “This is very sensitive data and we take it seriously.”
Anonymized recordings of each session are used to train Theris’ AI, spanning over 150,000 hours of clinical encounters so far. The models rank patient goals higher than patient-reported outcome questionnaires, which capture how a patient feels but may not align with quality of life improvements. “If they’re feeling less depressed, but they’re still not able to get out of bed, how important is it?” Capone noted.
The goal is to reach 1 million training hours by next year. Each of Theris’ models, built atop open-source foundational model Qwen, is specialized for specific diagnostic categories. Theris owns the code to its models, which live on its own servers. Behavioral health is “one of the most incredible applications of large language models,” per Capone, because they are really good at analyzing language, which is what talk therapy is all about. “The words are the treatment,” he noted.
Theris accepts commercial, Medicaid and Medicare plans in most states it’s in. To support billing, Theris generates structured clinical notes that align with a provider’s documentation template and writes them directly into the patient’s chart. Theris does this through integration with several EHRs. “It’s very easy for providers to get denied from insurance companies, … or they just don’t get paid what they should get paid,” Capone said. “In most cases, they’re already doing this work, but they miss the billing code.”
Theris also captures video-derived vitals, such as heart rate and breathing rate, from the patient’s webcam with no wearable needed. Between sessions, Theris checks in with patients daily with a single question about how they’re feeling to monitor symptoms.
The startup was bootstrapped by its founders and spent two years in stealth building, training and refining its AI models. It has since raised multiple rounds of funding, the details of which have not been disclosed. While the company has been kept under wraps, Theris clinicians currently see patients across hundreds of facilities, sober living homes, Veterans Affairs community residences, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living communities and K-12 schools.
This week, one of Theris’ practice group subsidiaries was accepted into the CMS ACCESS model to participate in value-based behavioral healthcare.
“At DocGo, over six years we treated more than a million patients, most of them from underserved communities, and saved thousands of lives by bringing advanced technology into emergency medicine. That experience drives everything we’re building at Theris,” Capone, the former CEO of DocGo who resigned from the company in 2023 amid a scandal, said.
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