Brooklyn Health Raises $6.5M to Bring AI–and Standards–to Mental Health Trials
Brooklyn Health provides comprehensive, community-based care management services for Medicaid patients.
There’s no X-ray for depression. No blood test for schizophrenia. And in clinical trials, that lack of objective benchmarks has made measuring mental health drug efficacy both inconsistent and imprecise. That’s where Brooklyn Health steps in.
Led by founder and CEO Anzar Abbas, the Brooklyn-based startup just raised $6.5 million in seed funding—led by HealthX Ventures, with backing from Metrodora Ventures, Story Ventures, and others—to tackle one of psychiatry’s biggest bottlenecks: the subjective nature of mental health assessments in clinical trials.
From Pen-and-Paper to AI-Powered Precision
Traditionally, clinical trial assessments rely on clinicians interviewing patients and jotting down symptoms—a method vulnerable to bias, inconsistency, and oversight. Brooklyn Health’s AI tool, Willis, flips the script.
Willis is an AI-powered electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) platform that evaluates interviews using not just the words spoken, but also facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone. The goal? Make every patient interaction quantifiable, reviewable, and reliable.
“If I break my arm, I can get an X-ray. If I have an infection, I can run a lab test. But there’s no blood test for depression,” says Abbas.
Willis helps fill that void—bringing a new layer of rigor to psychiatric trials and giving drug developers a more standardized way to measure outcomes.
Already Backed by Big Pharma
Brooklyn Health is already working with industry giants like Boehringer Ingelheim and Bristol Myers Squibb, offering a scalable way to ensure trial data quality without adding massive overhead. Since many pharma companies only review a fraction of patient interviews due to time constraints, Willis’ AI analysis enables 100% oversight—automatically.
Open Source, Open Ambition
The company isn’t hoarding its tech either. Since launch, Brooklyn Health’s codebase has been open source, a strategic move to encourage industry-wide adoption and standardization. Abbas says the long-term vision includes expanding to broader mental health diagnostics and enabling more personalized treatments.
For investors like Laura Hilty at HealthX Ventures, it’s a bold move into a highly regulated—but deeply needed—space:
“Startups often hesitate to touch clinical trials because of the complexity. Brooklyn Health is proving it’s possible—and valuable—to modernize them.”
With fresh funding and pharma traction, Brooklyn Health is aiming to raise the bar for mental health trials—one standardized, AI-reviewed assessment at a time.
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