In May 2017, an email landed in a Bengaluru inbox from a 13 year old girl in America. Five months earlier, Ramakant Vempati and his wife and co-founder had put a chatbot on the Play Store behind an invite code, mostly to see what would happen. The girl wrote that she had depression, that she had tried to take her own life, and that the chatbot was the only thing helping her hold on.

That’s when the penny dropped. And that’s when I started believing, saying, oh my God, this is something serious.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The hammers looking for a nail

Nothing in Ramakant’s CV pointed here. An MBA overseas, then strategy consulting, then investment banking at Goldman Sachs in London.

So I’m a consultant, so strategy consulting, investment banking. So as far away from mental health as you can imagine. So I probably caused more mental health issues than I solved in my earlier life.

In 2009 he and his wife left corporate life for a social enterprise set up under the UN and World Bank umbrella, endowed by the Qatari royal family, with Nobel laureates on the board and a mandate to build livelihoods in Middle Eastern conflict zones. Ramakant built a $100 million impact investment portfolio.

To make an impact or to move the needle on a big problem, you need creativity more than money.

They returned to India as, in his phrase, hammers looking for a nail. The nail found them. There was suicide and depression among friends and family. His father had bipolar disorder and was living alone. Ramakant became a caregiver, and the product’s first test subject, and remained unconvinced.

I was a skeptic, to be honest. When we launched, I was like, who will talk to an AI chatbot? Those days, they were customer service bots or bank bots or travel booking bots, and they were pathetic.

Within days of opening the invite codes, Wysa was adding 2,000 to 3,000 users a day, all organic, from people typing words like “therapy” and “anxiety” into the Play Store.

In mental health context, imagine a public health system serving maybe 3,000 people a year. And here we were getting 3,000 people a day.

Scale arrived years before a business model. What converted it was an email in 2020 that Ramakant assumed was a hoax until he checked the domain. A psychiatric nurse in the NHS wanted to know whether the founders had any idea what they had done, because her patients on long waitlists had nothing else and Wysa was the only thing staying on their phones. She then offered to teach them how to sell into the NHS.

Almost everything institutional flows from that stranger. Wysa now has more than 45 peer reviewed publications with partners including Cambridge, Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis. Its Digital Referral Assistant, built to the NHS DCB0129 clinical safety standard, has handled over 117,000 patients across 31 NHS Talking Therapies services since 2022, lifting self-referral completion to 91% and saving clinicians an average of 21 minutes per assessment. It powers Singapore’s national mindline.sg portal, works with nine insurers, and co-built a product with Swiss Re that reported a 30% fall in depression rates in December 2025. A trial with Travelers found injured employees using Wysa returned to work one third faster.

Winning by making the AI do less

While the industry raced to hand everything to large language models, Wysa built a cage around one. Ramakant calls the design neurosymbolic.

Symbolic architecture, which is creating guidance, control and safety, inside which there is a neural architecture which is delivering depth of conversation. And you need to have a fine balance between both.

His sharpest argument is about crisis handling. The liability-safe response of every general-purpose model is to refuse and print a helpline number.

Guess how many people actually make that call, even if they were in distress? It’s probably 10%. The remaining nine are in a sense left high and dry.

So Wysa builds a personal safety plan with users while they are calm, then invokes it when distress is detected. You said you would call your mother. Is this the time to make that call? Wysa is now working with IEEE on global standards for AI and mental health.

Buying the pathway, and printing a workbook

Healthcare carries a documented 17 year lag between proven innovation and adoption. Rather than wait it out, Wysa merged with April Health in March 2025, unlocking Collaborative Care billing codes inside US primary care, then acquired the physical therapy company Kins in September 2025, adding a second reimbursement pathway. Both were stock swaps, for equity in a Bengaluru headquartered company.

The economics are unusually disciplined for a nine year old AI business. Ramakant puts revenue at roughly $11 million ARR heading to about $20 million, split evenly between US healthcare reimbursement and population contracts, on a team of about 150 and an average burn of $1.1 to $1.5 million a year against roughly $30 million raised. He expects to be EBITDA positive within 18 months.

India remains 20% of usage and almost none of the revenue, because willingness to pay is close to zero.

One of the largest providers of mental health in India is an astrology platform.

So Wysa stopped selling an app here. Dream Kit is a printed emotional resilience workbook for adolescent girls, delivered through municipal schools out of textbook budgets, with QR codes opening anonymous chat in Marathi. It is designed for a girl who borrows her mother’s phone for an hour a day. In February 2026, Wellcome awarded Wysa £5.3 million to scale it across rural India.

A billion conversations in, the number that still runs the company is smaller. In a Slack channel logging every review, the team counts the people who write in to say the app kept them alive. Starting with that 13 year old, it stands at about 500.

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Akshay Datt

The Founder Thesis Podcast | Learn from disruptive founders

Ramakant Vempati On Building Wysa