[100 Emerging Women Leaders] How Srishti Srivastava built wellness startup Infiheal and got a mention on PM Modi’s Mann Ki Baat

In 2003, when Srishti Srivastava was 12 years old, she got an opportunity to be on Child Genius, India’s biggest TV quiz show for kids, hosted by Siddhartha Basu on Star World. 

She was excited to be among the 320 child prodigies invited to compete, but fate had other plans. She froze and things only got worse later.

“It was extremely awkward. My voice started shaking. While they were filming, I kind of tried to prevent myself from crying. After it got over, I started bawling and my father basically had to get me out of the sets. Since then, I had this feeling that people were watching me, making fun of me, and I was being ridiculed,” she says.

After the incident, Srivastava forced her parents to seek a diagnosis and the family moved from Nagpur to Mumbai.  

This was the beginning of Srivastava’s battle with social anxiety, which continued into her adult life. This also became the meaning and purpose to start Infiheal, a mental health startup, which was launched in 2021.

But before that, Srivastava cracked the IIT-JEE exams and joined IIT Bombay for a degree in Chemical Engineering. She continued to be an introvert, striving to be perfect yet found a lot of acceptance because there were several others like her.

Since the first incident, she had many such moments of social anxiety, especially when she had to “perform” or be in a crowd. She would also bear the brunt of bullying, which only reinforced in her that she “was not good enough”. 

“I was able to overcome some of my fears and continued going for regular talk therapy. I didn’t want to take any medication because I thought it would impact my performance,” she says. 

She also felt she had symptoms of adult ADHD though it was hard to get a diagnosis back then. But, the symptoms of social anxiety persisted. 

After completing her course, Srivastava was placed in KPMG in 2014 in financial risk management, a position that exposed her to a different field. She later joined a US-based startup called Trixie and after a short stint, decided to prepare for the Civil Services exams. She also became a part of the Chief Minister’s Fellowship Program of the Government of Maharashtra.

AI companion for mental health

But the idea of starting something in the mental health space remained at the back of her mind. 

“I wanted to bring something like a Calm or Headspace to India. But I quickly realised it’s very hard to monetise content that can be easily accessed on YouTube,” she points out.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, she found that a lot of people in her circle were facing some sort of crisis or the other and were taking therapy and mental health support. She felt it was the opportune time to venture into the field.

“In all these years, I might have seen around 20 therapists; some of them worked, others didn’t. And, I tried to uncover what worked for me; why did I gravitate towards a specific therapist?” she elaborates. 

Apart from basic filters like location and qualifications, Srivastav stresses on the need to speak to someone who matches your wavelength. This led her to study more about personality systems and the need for a robust therapist matching system.

“I thought of building an AI-based framework that talks to people, and matches them to a therapist. That was my initial chatbot, and when ChatGPT released in November 2023, we shifted by systems to create Healo, an AI companion for emotional health and happiness,” she adds. 

Healo, Srivastava explains, talks to you and understands your personality. 

“If it feels the issue is severe, it will match you to the right in-house therapist based on your personality and your needs immediately. If you are going through a suicidal ideation or psychosis, it will connect you to a distress helpline.” 

“For life issues, relationship issues, heartbreak, loss, problems at work, financial difficulties etc., Healo can provide a similar experience to life coaching or counselling via chat,” she explains. 

Healo also offers a timer for focus, relaxing tracks to soothe anxiety, and other self-care activities. It also recommends books appropriate to your mood and mental space or movies that work well with grief, and more.

“We made a repository of therapy sessions and essentially fed our data into the best LLMs (large language models) in the market. Our therapists meticulously collated the required data to feed these models so that it can respond like a therapist would. But most importantly, we also added a lot of safety features to it,” she says.

She admits that ChatGPT can make mistakes and “hallucinate”, but by using its own data, Healo can bring them down considerably, and for high-risk cases redirect them outside of the Gen AI to distress helplines, because it’s better if humans deal with them. 

Healo has also undergone cultural training to differentiate between Indian and US clients. It is available as a web app and also recently launched its iOS and Android versions. So far, the web app has recorded over three lakh conversations.

Srivastava shares very few conversations translated into therapy sessions because people were using the chatbot because they wanted a companion and preferred the anonymity it offered. 

It starts with a free plan accessible for a week and then moves on to 20 chats for Rs 49 and other specific paid plans for therapy and life-coaching.

She admits that the B2C market is difficult to crack in India, so Infiheal looks to working with government agencies.

“We are working with the National Institute for the Empowerment of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities (NIEPID) and National Institute for Mental Health and Rehabilitation (NIMHR) to cater to their patients. Post this, we intend to enhance our coverage through hospitals,” she adds.

Infiheal has also created a community of 1,000 mental health professionals that it hopes will recommend it to people. It is also following the conventional Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) route by reaching out to companies. 

As Healo is anonymous, it’s low effort and one doesn’t need to book a session through HR to use the chatbot.

Infiheal won Nasscom’s AI for Business Grand Challenge (in partnership with IBM) last year. It recently raised a seed round of funding from VCs and investors. In December last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the 108th address of his radio show Mann ki Baat, mentioned Infiheal and another mental wellness startup YourDost as startups using AI for mental health and wellbeing.

Srivastava says hiring the right people and retaining them has been challenging. Understanding regulatory issues, involving the right stakeholders, and then monetising the platform have been the other important aspects of the process.

For women who want to start up, she has some sage advice.

“It’s best to be prepared to take challenges head-on. It’s important to have cheerleaders who can be your evangelists, other fellow women founders to support you,” she says.