Behavioural health clinics in the U.S. are struggling under a wave of demand they can hardly manage. Autism and ADHD diagnoses have skyrocketed, Medicaid requirements keep evolving, and clinicians say they’re spending too much time buried in documentation and compliance tasks instead of treating patients. That’s the problem Hipp Health set out to solve.
The San Francisco-based startup, which has just raised $6.2 million in seed funding led by RTP Global, with participation from Swift Ventures, Rackhouse Venture Capital, and Difference Partners, has built an AI-native platform designed to automate the unglamorous but critical operational work that keeps behavioural health practices afloat, from clinical documentation and billing to compliance and scheduling.
Lack of behavioural health services available in the US
The company was founded in early 2024 by David Connors, former VP of Product Strategy at Workday, and Faaez Ul Haq, who previously led ML teams at Pipe and Uber. The duo’s motivation came from firsthand experience seeing how ill-equipped many behavioural health offices were when it came to technology.
Connors told TFN, “Faaez and I have been working at the intersection of AI and workforce technology for most of our careers and met while advising an ABA practice looking to bring a digital edge to its business. We quickly found ourselves frustrated with the lack of modern digital tools available to providers and billing teams that don’t have access to platforms like Epic that are commonly used in hospitals.”
That insight sparked the idea for Hipp Health: an AI-native all-in-one alternative to legacy electronic medical record (EMR) systems such as CentralReach, Rethink, and TheraNest. “We saw the potential of AI to reduce or even eliminate some of the most frustrating and burnout-producing tasks practices face every day: intake, scheduling, clinical documentation, and claims scrubbing,” Connors said.
He added, “Knowing that most independent practices don’t have the budget or expertise to integrate and manage complex systems, our vision was to build a single, all-in-one platform that was low cost and easy to use.”
The first AI native data model that spans all functions of a healthcare practice
Under the hood, Hipp’s technology is what Connors calls “the first AI native data model that spans all functions of a healthcare practice.” He added, “Our model is HIPAA compliant and built to the highest security standards. This AI foundation allows Hipp to rapidly build new use cases and deliver AI value without complex integrations, configurations, and duplicative costs.”
The company also utilises privacy-safe retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enable clinicians to query patient data safely, without risk of exposure to commercial large language models.
Hipp’s customers are often replacing long-standing systems originally designed decades ago. “There are many 15+ year old EMR technologies on the market that will be replaced by AI,” Connors said. “Hipp’s customers often replace platforms like CentralReach, Rethink and others, while also retiring 5+ point solutions that may have been added to improve intake, scheduling, and other processes.”
What’s next?
With fresh funding in the bank, Hipp plans to broaden its reach into applied behaviour analysis (ABA), occupational therapy (OT), and speech therapy, while also building out new features for billing, payments, accounting, and clinical decision support.
“We will continue to expand our customer base in ABA, OT, and Speech. The goal is to make the business of running a behavioural health practice as smooth as the care itself,” Connors concluded.
