Empowering Behavioral Health Providers With AI: Our Investment in Eleos
Today, we are thrilled to announce our lead investment in Eleos Health as part of the company’s $40 million Series B. Eleos is the leader in CareOps Automation for behavioral health and joins Menlo Ventures’ exciting portfolio of healthcare software and AI companies.
In recent years post-pandemic, mental healthcare needs have dramatically increased as patients, health plans, and employers have realized its importance for overall well-being. While the number of mental health sessions has surged 20% to 330 million sessions per year in the U.S. alone, the size of the mental health workforce has not kept up—putting significant stress on providers as they handle the influx of patients.
Over 90% of behavioral health providers report symptoms of burnout. One of the biggest culprits is the administrative and documentation load that can consume up to a quarter of a provider’s day. Though critical for tracking patient progress and receiving payor reimbursement, this burden weighs on providers who joined the profession to spend time working directly with patients, not filling out forms.
Behavioral health is unique from other medical fields in that the conversation between the patient and the provider is, in fact, the treatment. This conversation presents a rich surface area for not only streamlining administrative work like clinical documentation, but also providing insights to improve the quality of care.
That is where Eleos Health starts: the conversation. Eleos compliantly captures a behavioral health session in real-time, combines it with data from a patient’s medical record and input from the provider, and automatically produces a summary of the session with the clinical context.
Eleos Health’s proprietary LLM, which has been trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of audio from behavioral health sessions, can understand the substance of the sessions and draw clinical meaning rooted in provider perspective. The AI co-pilot approach means that the provider is always in control. Users review and edit the documentation that Eleos generates, which, in turn, allows the software to learn more about each provider’s style and preferences over time.
Eleos can also provide personalized guidance on therapy themes and the use of evidence-based techniques, while giving clinical managers better visibility into patient progress and outcomes. Peer-reviewed studies have already shown the use of Eleos can lead to more effective therapy that helps patients get better faster. As behavioral health utilization matures over time, we also believe tools like Eleos will allow providers to validate clinical quality to payors.
In healthcare, it is rare to find products that are beloved by both frontline providers and administrators, but Eleos has done it. Providers describe Eleos as “life-changing” and say that they’d “be devastated if you took it away.” With Eleos, documentation times have dropped by more than 50% and provider job satisfaction increased significantly. For administrators, Eleos is a solution for reducing provider burnout and increasing retention in a competitive talent market, while also assuring downstream payor compliance for reimbursement.
The founders of Eleos—Alon Joffe, Dror Zaide, and Alon Rabinovich—stand out for their combination of pragmatism and ambition to rethink the status quo in behavioral health. Having previously served in the Israeli military, they saw firsthand the importance of treatment for their colleagues with PTSD and set out to improve care access and quality in behavioral health.
The team’s product velocity and technical depth has enabled Eleos to quickly become the leader in automating the behavioral care workflow, freeing clinicians to focus on the care itself. They have also assembled a seasoned executive team that comes from healthcare pioneers like athenaHealth, Livongo, Aledade, and Kyruus. We are excited to be on the journey with them to rethink behavioral health.
At Menlo, we’ve partnered with several healthcare software companies that have redefined their industries, including Benchling, Rivet, Recursion, Qualio, H1, and more. We believe vertical markets like healthcare will be supercharged by AI-native products that cut down on repetitive work and increase productivity. Eleos also joins our portfolio of AI and vertical SaaS companies like Typeface, Everlaw, Aisera, Abnormal Security, and Observe.AI. If you are a founder building an applied AI company tackling a vertical or horizontal market, we’d love to chat with you.
