JotPsych, DC startup building AI tools for behavioral health, closes $5M seed

In another sign of AI’s charm on investors, DC’s JotPsych landed a $5 million seed round led by one of San Francisco’s most prominent VC firms.

The healthtech company, headquartered in a rowhouse in Columbia Heights, builds AI-powered tools to streamline administrative tasks for behavioral health professionals. It plans to use the funding to hire staff and expand offerings, according to cofounder and CEO Nathan Peereboom. 

“We want to take away anything that gets in the way of ‘therapeutic alliance,’” Peereboom told Technical.ly, using the company’s term for the patient-clinician relationship, “and anything that gets in the way of the clinician using their brain to make decisions that benefit the person they’re serving.”

Toward a fully agentic electronic health record

Founded in 2023, JotPsych’s first product was an AI scribe for clinicians, a tool that automates documenting sessions with patients.

Now the company is building out an HIPAA compliant toolkit to automate billing, scheduling, lab orders and other duties — with the goal to be a fully agentic electronic health record (often called an EHR, or just a digital version of a “patient chart”). 

Psychiatrists spend about 20% of their working hours on administrative tasks, according to a study by the National Institutes of Health. There’s also a shortage of mental health professionals — there are 13 per 100,000 people, per the World Health Organization’s Mental Health Atlas. 

To tackle this gap, startups addressing pain points in the behavioral health industry are popping up across the US, including firms that offer therapy chatbots. In most cases, experts say it’s too early to tell the long term effects. 

Joining Figma and Instacart as Base 10 investments

Raising the $5 million, which includes funds from angel investors, took about two weeks, per Peereboom. Terms were signed in January. 

JotPsych had around six different offers to lead the round, but Peereboom said the relationship was strongest with San Francisco’s Base10, known for its investments in grocery delivery service Instacart and cloud prototyping tool Figma. 

Base10 has been helpful in the hiring process and advising about business strategy, Peereboom said. He declined to disclose if investors have seats on JotPsych’s board. 

He and cofounder and CTO Jackson Bierfeldt previously raised about $300,000 in a friends and family round in 2024 through a SAFE note. SAFEs exchange investment for shares in future rounds of funding and outlines how and when the funds will turn into equity. Before that, they were bootstrapping, he said — by fall 2023, just six months after founding, the company was generating revenue.

The founders made 10 hires already this year, and have a few more jobs open. 

Peereboom and Bierfeldt want JotPsych to be the “spinal cord” in clinics. The tools do not power any clinical decision making, Bierfeldt explained, just administrative and scribe work. 

“JotPsych is going to make it so that you can save more and more of your time,” Bierfeldt said, “and then just make more eye contact with your patient and client.”

Updated Aug. 2 to clarify the amount and details of the friends and family fundraising round.