Theris, an AI-powered behavioral health provider, has launched stealth with an update to its platform.
The startup, founded in 2023, provides care and complements it with artificial intelligence tools for providers, automating clinical workflows from admission to billing. As sessions take place, AI agents record and analyze the sessions, with the patient’s consent. AI agents can uncover details in a patient’s medical history that a provider overlooked or flag potential drug interactions, among other capabilities.
“Our number one goal is better outcomes for patients,” co-founder and CEO Anthony Capone told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview.
Theris employs behavioral health providers and has partner providers who use its platform. It has been serving patients since 2024 and operates in 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 microexpressions during sessions, generating treatment plan recommendations. Early data shows that AI-enhanced sessions achieve 94% diagnostic accuracy compared to human psychology assessments, Theris says. The platform also creates a checklist for the provider that is automatically populated by analyzing transcripts. In cases of patient refusal, the system detects resistance and alerts the provider to adjust their approach.
Theris Session Sample
Screenshot of the Theris platform (Theris)
The company’s next phase is aimed at becoming an FDA Class II medical device, capable of performing psychology and psychiatry completely autonomously. “Our thesis is that AI-delivered psychotherapy and psychiatry will be reimbursed” in the coming years by commercial and government payers, Capone said, referring to FDA-approved medical devices. This “will be an option that many patients will pursue, in addition to traditional human-led psychotherapy and psychiatry.”
To train providers, Theris developed an AI patient avatar that responds in real time, guiding the doctor through the psychiatric admission. This helps simulate scenarios, which is especially important for complex patients who take many medications.
Each patient is warned that their session is recorded to improve care, and providers must also request verbal consent. Less than 1% of the time, Theris patients choose not to register. “We are very clear with them how the data is used,” Capone said. Data is not shared externally or anonymized for training purposes. “This is very sensitive data and we take it seriously.”
Anonymous recordings of each session are used to train Theris AI, which so far spans over 150,000 hours of clinical encounters. The models rank patient goals above patient-reported outcome questionnaires, which capture how a patient feels but may not be aligned with improvements in quality of life. “If they feel less depressed, but still can’t get out of bed, what difference does it make?” Capone pointed out.
The goal is to reach one million hours of training next year. Each of Theris’ models, built on the foundational open source Qwen model, is specialized in specific diagnostic categories. Theris owns the code for its models, which reside on its own servers. Behavioral health is “one of the most incredible applications of great language models,” according to Capone, because they are really good at analyzing language, which is what talk therapy is all about. “Words are the treatment,” he noted.
Theris accepts commercial plans, Medicaid, and Medicare in most states where it is located. To support billing, Theris generates structured clinical notes that align with the provider’s documentation template and writes them directly to the patient’s record. Theris does this by integrating with various EHRs. “It’s very easy for insurance companies to deny providers… or simply not pay them what they should,” Capone said. “In most cases, they are already doing this work, but they miss the billing code.”
Theris also captures video-derived vital signs, such as heart rate and respiratory rate, from the patient’s webcam without the need for a wearable device. Between sessions, Theris checks in with patients daily with a single question about how they are feeling to monitor symptoms.
The startup was started by its founders and spent two years stealthily building, training and refining its AI models. Since then, it has raised multiple rounds of funding, the details of which have not been disclosed. While the company has remained secretive, Theris doctors currently care for patients at 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 to emergency medicine. That experience drives everything we are building at Theris,” said Capone, DocGo’s former CEO who resigned from the company in 2023 amid scandal.
