Spring Health

Liquid AI

Spring Health

B2B employer benefit — similar model to Lyra Health but with a sharper focus on precision matching. Companies pay Spring Health a per-employee-per-month fee.

Employees take an initial assessment and Spring Health's algorithm recommends a care pathway: therapy, medication management, coaching, digital self-care, or a combination. The key differentiator is the precision — the algorithm claims to reduce treatment time by 50% by getting the right match first instead of cycling through options.

Spring Health also provides a therapist network, psychiatric services, and crisis support. Revenue scales with employer contracts and employee utilization.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Spring Health

April Koh was studying computational neuroscience at Yale when she encountered research on precision medicine for depression — the idea that you could use data to predict which patients would respond to therapy versus medication versus a combination. The existing system was essentially trial and error: try an antidepressant for six weeks, and if it doesn't work, try another one.

Meanwhile, patients suffer. Koh co-founded Spring Health in 2016 with Adam Chekroud, a Yale neuroscience PhD, to build a platform that uses machine learning to match employees to the right mental health treatment on the first try.

They started by publishing peer-reviewed research showing their algorithms could predict treatment response better than chance, then turned that research into a product that employers would pay for.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Spring Health

Enterprise sales to large employers, competing directly with Lyra Health, Headspace Health, and traditional EAP providers. Spring Health leads with outcomes data — publishing research showing faster recovery times and higher clinical improvement rates than industry benchmarks.

Celebrity advisor Apolo Ohno and high-profile board members gave early credibility. Series C at $2.5 billion valuation generated press coverage that opened doors.

International expansion to serve global workforces. Strategic investment from Kinnevik gave European distribution relationships.

Partnership with health plans to offer Spring Health as the behavioral health component within existing benefits.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Spring Health

Direct competition with Lyra Health, which is larger and better-funded. The employer mental health benefit space is crowded and increasingly commoditized — every startup claims better outcomes and faster ROI.

Therapist supply is the binding constraint across the entire industry. Proving that ML-driven matching actually produces better outcomes than simply having a good therapist network is a difficult clinical claim to substantiate at scale.

Employee engagement is everything — if employees don't take the initial assessment, the precision matching engine can't work. And the macro headwind: employer benefits budgets are under pressure, and mental health benefits are easier to cut than medical benefits when money gets tight.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Spring Health

Precision mental health platform — ML-driven assessment that predicts optimal treatment pathway for each individual. Therapist matching engine connecting employees to the right provider by specialty, approach, and predicted fit.

Spring Health Moments — bite-sized digital exercises based on CBT for mild symptoms. Medication management through in-house psychiatric providers.

Manager and HR tools for supporting teams without violating privacy. Work-life coaching for non-clinical needs like stress and work-life balance.

Family support extending benefits to dependents. Crisis support including 24/7 access for emergencies.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Spring Health

Investors include Tiger Global Management, Kinnevik, Northzone, William K. Warren Foundation, and Able Partners.

Series C in 2022 valued the company at $2.5 billion.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.