- With the sharp rise of meditation and other mental health app themes, a dozen billion-dollar startups have emerged. It seems that a similar leap is imminent now — when you can still create your own billion-dollar startup.
- There is a huge market for psychological assistance, which is soon to surpass $100 billion. Within it, the online therapy segment is taking off. And within it, the segment of “AI psychologists” should now start to sharply rise.
- Moreover, each of them will have its own specialization, so there are still many opportunities here. And here is an example of what and how you can enter here:
Project Essence
Relationships in a couple can be preserved — but only if they turn to the Maia app for help 😉
Maia is an AI assistant specifically designed to help couples in relationships. Essentially, it replaces a live psychologist specializing in family relationships — which couples usually don’t reach out to before breaking up.
Firstly, the AI assistant can help each member of the couple independently understand themselves — which often is the real cause of problems arising in relationships with their significant other. For example, if you subconsciously feel dissatisfied with yourself, it’s easier for you to lash out at your partner and blame them for something, rather than admitting the true reason for your dissatisfaction with yourself.
Secondly, Maia can provide advice on how to deal with an already arisen problem or how to handle the current situation better in order to preserve the relationship.
On the other hand, family relationship psychologists usually work with the couple, not with each member separately. In the Maia app, there’s also a switch between personal dialogue and dialogue with the couple. In one window, you can deal with your own problems, and in the other, communicate with your significant other under the guidance of the AI assistant — who will ask relaxing or, on the contrary, provocative questions.
If the dialogue between the members of the couple starts to heat up, the AI assistant will immediately intervene to act as a mediator and calm the speakers down.
Maia is not limited to just conversations. Based on the course of the dialogues, the AI assistant can suggest to the couple where they can go together in the current situation and what activities to engage in to support their relationship. If they don’t feel like going anywhere, Maia can suggest playing a game together, which can also help resolve the situation.
The suggestions of the AI assistant will also take into account the interests of each participant in the couple, which they can describe in the settings of their own application.
Any big goal, including maintaining relationships, consists of a sequence of small steps. These actions are best performed every day, so Maia sets daily small tasks for the couple and each of its members to complete — for example, meditate, ask their partner a question suggested by the app and contemplate the response, or simply share with the AI assistant what bothered one half of the couple in communication with the other half yesterday.
The app will even remind about any significant dates for the couple, which men too often forget 😉
Maia is a participant in the current Y Combinator batch, from which they received their first $500,000 investment. The startup launched its app just 2 days ago.
What’s interesting
Earlier, I mentioned that the Maia app can replace a family psychologist. But is there such a big market where someone needs to be replaced?
Turns out, it’s not that small 😉 ‘Marriage counselors’ in the USA provide services worth almost 1 billion dollars a year. There are over 5 thousand such businesses in the USA, employing over 8 thousand people, meaning on average one such business consists of a psychologist plus their assistant.
This 1 billion per year is earned not only by those who have matured emotionally enough to go to a psychologist, but also by those who can afford it. After all, one session with a psychologist typically costs $150–300, and usually, one session doesn’t solve the problem.
In other words, the potential market for this type of service is even larger than 1 billion — it includes those for whom the current prices of live psychologists are too high, as well as those who cannot bring themselves to talk to someone about their problems.
This immediately reminded me of the startup Mettle, which I wrote about last December. This startup made an app for providing psychological help to men — most of whom are not ready to discuss their problems with other people, mainly because ‘men don’t cry’ 😉 But with an AI assistant in the app, they can have a conversation. Mettle raised £2.5 million in investment based on this concept.
The large size of the marriage counseling market is explained by the large number of problems that arise in the lives of couples.
Confirmation of this is the fact that about half of all marriages end in divorce. However, if you look at American statistics, you can see that the percentage of marriages ending in divorce has been decreasing over the last 10 years — and now it’s around 44%.
But this impression is deceptive. The reason is that since the 90s in the USA, the number of official weddings has started to decrease. In other words, people prefer not to get married so they don’t have to get divorced later 😉 Apparently, this is why divorce statistics have improved.
So, the problem of family relationships is not only eternal but also significant. If half of the couple’s problems end in divorce, then how many more couples continue to live together despite their problems, due to habit or circumstances ☹️
In general, problems should be addressed not when they arise but when they have not yet taken the form of an obvious problem. The founders of the startup refer to the ‘well-known fact’ that couples only turn to psychologists after 6 years of actually unhappy married life. I found a lot of references to this fact online.
Although in reality, as it turned out, someone interpreted Dr. Gottman’s research, who could predict with 90% accuracy the likelihood of divorce for a couple who had just married, after 4–6 years.
Nevertheless, this means that right now it is possible and necessary to start working on ‘treating’ what may be the cause of divorce in 4–6 years. This is exactly what Maia does.
The same problem is being addressed by another startup Flamme when it was still called Sparks. However, it has mainly focused on finding opportunities for couples to spend time together to maintain and strengthen their relationships.
A conversational AI helping to connect, establish, and maintain relationships with other people, but without focusing on family relationships, is done by the startup Meeno, which I wrote about last fall. This startup was founded by the former CEO of the Tinder dating service.
Where to Run
The market for psychological services will continue to grow. By 2028, it is expected to reach $118 billion.
However, within it, as seen in the picture, the market for online psychological therapy is growing at an even faster pace. By 2028, it is expected to grow to $16 billion.
There is a feeling that within the online therapy market, a separate segment of AI therapy will begin to grow even better 😉 These will be psychological services provided by AI assistants like Maia, Meeno, and many others with different specializations.
The reason for this is clear. The market for psychological services is growing because the population of the Earth is increasing, and it seems that the number of problems for these people is only increasing ☹️ However, as mentioned above, not everyone will go to a psychologist, and moreover, not everyone will have enough money to pay for it.
Against this background, AI psychologists can really take off! Moreover, no less, and perhaps even more, than applications for meditations and other tools for improving mental health did in their time.
Therefore, the direction of movement is to hurry up and enter the market of AI psychologists before it explodes.
The rise of the mental health topic has given birth to more than a dozen startups valued at over $1 billion. Billion-dollar startups should also emerge in the field of AI psychology. And one of them could be yours 😉
About the Company
Maia
Website: ourmaia.com
Last funding round: $500K, 01.12.2023
Total investments: $500K, rounds: 1