Our Investment in Psyrin

Psychiatry Needs Biomarkers

Psychiatry’s gold standard needs to be improved. Heavily reliant on psychiatrist expertise, outdated diagnostic manuals, and lengthy patient interviews, the field is in need of biomarkers to usher in a new era of discovery and accurate diagnoses that can power therapeutic development.

Today’s experience of trial and error can leave patients frustrated with extended timelines, delayed or improper diagnoses, and medication mismatch. Clinics and clinicians also face bottlenecks in their triaging, risk assessment, diagnostics, and monitoring processes.

The Brains Behind It All

Building the future of psychiatry takes expertise. Psyrin’s team not only brings strong pedigrees, but also experience-driven passion. They are motivated by personal ties to serious mental illness, inspiring their passion and hunger to pave a brighter future. We were introduced to the Psyrin team by our friends at Dorm Room Fund (thank you Zach Jaffe!).

Psyrin is led by Dr. Edwin Wong (CEO), Dr. Julianna Olah (CTO), and Dr. Raheem Chaudhry (COO).

Edwin received his PhD from King’s College London and the National University of Singapore, where he researched the genetics of mental health, specializing in cognition, dementia, and affective disorders.

Julianna is a data science expert in the subject, having received her PhD from King’s College London, where she researched speech biomarkers, natural language processing, and machine learning in mental health. Motivated by loss due to mental illness, she has founded several mental health companies, including the largest digital mental health service in Hungary.

Raheem is a medical doctor who received his MBBS from King's College London, with research expertise in non-imaging biomarkers for schizophrenia. He brings valuable clinical expertise and champions the shift to patient-centric and objective care in psychiatry.

How It Works

Psyrin’s technology feeds patient audio into their linguistic, semantic, syntactic and connectivity-based feature extraction pipeline. Using, machine learning, they produce a clinician report, providing first in class objective, explainable, and quantifiable vocal biomarkers.

They are working in two subdomains of mental health: serious mental illness and neurodivergence. For the latter, they recently launched Simon AI: a voice biomarker-based screening tool for ADHD, Autism and other neurodivergent traits.

And, voice is just the beginning.

Psyrin’s Vision

We are excited about the greater Psyrin vision: the prospect of a new, multimodal, biomarker-based standard for mental health diagnostics which flips the current paradigm on its head.

Starting with speech as a simple and powerful wedge, Psyrin will ultimately create a new diagnostic and treatment protocol, pushing the field to become faster, more objective and precise for patients who need it most.

2048 Ventures x Psyrin‍

We are thrilled to lead the $1M pre-seed investment in Psyrin, alongside our friends at Concept Ventures, and Spacecadet Ventures.

Learn more about Psyrin on their website, try Simon AI, and follow Edwin, Julianna, and Raheem on their journey.