ABOUT MENTALPORT
The rapid social change, even before Covid, has caused mental health problems of many people. Especially Students and young people are the main drivers of this development, yet many suffer from psychological issues. This is why Tim Kleber founded Mentalport in the first place.
The current founding team includes Nadya Kocheva (responsible for the development of psychological services), Vladimir Schaermann (CTO), Tim Kleber (CEO; he was also involved in the psychological and technical development of the product), programmer Christian Hoffmann (support for the application development team) and Sophia Wolf (social media manager). In addition to this, several current students support the development in the psychology area. A professional background in psychology and the same passion for helping people brought them together with the goal of alleviating one of society's biggest problems: the mental health of the younger generation.
Mentalport wants to ensure the availability of psychological help below the therapy level. This is because especially those students who cannot and do not want to go to a professional to help them with their psychological problems. This is mainly due to time, cost, stigma, and the fact that the problem is too low in severity to be diagnosed as a problem. To this end, mentalport plans to offer a three-tier service, including personalized guidance generated by artificial intelligence with psychological self-help exercises (St.1), chat (bot) communication with mentalport, and personal 1:1 counseling in a virtual room that can be accessed with an avatar. Initially, the target market is students or young people aged 17-27 who exhibit specific characteristics and a need for psychological support. In Germany, this applies to about 350,000 potential end-users.
A huge challenge for this startup was the knowledge in the field of artificial intelligence. In implementing the AI part of the offer - starting with the basic methods, model selection and performance. As the business model and scalability depend on the successful implementation of the AI part, the KI-Garage helps them with basic AI knowledge and individual mentoring. The company's big vision is to digitize and automize psychological help.