OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive Global launch new company Thrive AI Health

The OpenAI Startup Fund and Arianna Huffington’s behavioral change technology platform Thrive Global announced the pair is launching a new company, Thrive AI Health, to expand access to personalized behavioral change health coaching using generative AI. 

Thrive AI Health will offer an AI-enabled personalized health coach that will help scale behavioral change across five areas: connection, sleep, fitness, stress management, and food. The companies tout the coach as a tool for disease prevention and treatment optimization.

The AI-enabled coach will leverage OpenAI and Thrive Global’s behavioral change methodology. It will be trained on peer-reviewed science, users’ personal preferences and goals, and biometric, lab and other medical data. 

The coach will generate personalized insights and provide nudges and recommendations to users pertaining to the five key behaviors. 

OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global will be the company’s lead investors, and the Alice L. Walton Foundation will be a strategic investor. 

Thrive AI Health’s CEO will be DeCarlos Love, a former product leader at Google. He led sensors, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, and health and fitness experiences across all Google devices and platforms. Before Google, Love held product roles at Apple and Athos. 

Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe, professor of population health and medicine and director at NYU Langone’s Institute for Excellence in Health Equity, will serve as Thrive AI Health’s health equity advisor.

Additionally, the startup has established research partnerships with Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, Stanford Medicine and the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University, all of which are launch partners.

“Recent advancements in artificial intelligence present an unprecedented opportunity to make behavior change much more powerful and sustainable,” Love said in a statement. 

“Thrive AI Health Coach is the product to solve the limitations of current AI and LLM-based solutions by providing personalized, proactive and data-driven coaching across the five daily behaviors. This is how it will improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs and significantly impact chronic diseases worldwide.”

THE LARGER TREND

Experts say preventative care is mainly dependent on behavior and someone’s habits of self-care, whether they are aware of what’s good for them to stay healthy or not get sicker. AI can help address behavioral tendencies to help patients change how they care for themselves. 

New York-based Thrive Global, launched in 2016, offers employers science-backed behavior change software aimed at improving productivity and their employees’ health.

A year after its launch, Thrive Global secured $30 million in funding and raised $80 million in Series C funding in 2021. 

The company now has offices in New York, San Francisco, Melbourne, Dublin, Bucharest and Athens. 

In 2022, Thrive partnered with cloud customer experience company Genesys to help organizations offer employees well-being tools embedded into their organization’s workflow. 

Other companies in the behavioral health space include Pennsylvania-based company NeuroFlow, which acquired fellow behavioral digital health company Owl in June to expand its measurement-based offerings to help providers identify and manage behavioral care needs. 

In April, teletherapy company Talkspace launched its Behavioral Health Consortium, an offering allowing clinicians to refer insured members with high-acuity needs to in-network specialty-care providers for alcoholism, substance use and eating disorder treatments.