The AI scribe that wants therapists to look up from the notepad - and turns what they hear into clinical intelligence.
A 600-pixel-square logo, all curve and open space, sitting where a business card used to. The 'm' is meant to climb - the founders say it stands for the upward slope of a therapeutic journey, with the gap at the top left deliberately unfinished.
There is a small, structural absurdity at the heart of talk therapy: the person trained to pay careful attention to you spends part of the hour looking at a notepad instead of at you.
Mentalyc is a bet that this absurdity is a software problem. The San Francisco company, founded in 2021 by Maria Szandrach and Georgi Urumov, records a therapy session - with consent - and hands back a HIPAA-compliant progress note, a treatment plan, and a set of progress insights. The pitch to clinicians is blunt and mostly about time: it reportedly gives back up to 90% of the minutes spent on documentation, which in mental health is not a rounding error. Paperwork, not caseload, is the thing therapists cite when they talk about burning out.
What makes the company more interesting than a stopwatch is where it decided to go next. A note-taker is a feature. Mentalyc's ambition, stated plainly on its website, is to turn AI-generated notes into "clinical intelligence" - the sort of pattern-spotting a good clinical supervisor provides, except most therapists in private practice rarely see one. That is a much bigger claim, and the company has started shipping products to back it.
The most striking of these is Alliance Genie, launched in September 2025. The "therapeutic alliance" - the working bond between client and clinician - is one of the best-documented predictors of whether therapy works, and it has always been maddeningly invisible. Alliance Genie tries to make it legible, analyzing more than 30 psychosocial markers in a recording (empathy, rapport, engagement, client responsiveness) and returning structured feedback. Whether an algorithm should be grading intimacy is a fair question. That the question is now live is the point.
*Company-reported figures. Documentation savings vary by clinician and workflow.
"I had to switch therapists several times, no one was seemingly able to help me, repeating the same story over and over again."
— Maria Szandrach, Co-Founder & CEOMentalyc's origin is unusually personal. Maria Szandrach came to the problem not from healthcare strategy but from the couch: as a teenager she struggled with an eating disorder and cycled through therapists, each time reintroducing herself from scratch. She went on to found three startups and study management at London Business School, but the founding insight was that older frustration - the sense that the system had no memory of her.
Her co-founder, Georgi Urumov, supplied the part that made it buildable. He spent roughly a decade in data systems and machine learning, including work anonymizing sensitive data such as video - which is, conveniently, almost exactly the problem you face when you decide to process recordings of people's most private conversations. The company passed through Entrepreneurs First and Berkeley SkyDeck, the accelerators that tend to pair a domain obsessive with a technical one.
Former patient turned founder. Three startups, an MSc from London Business School, and a mission shaped by her own recovery. Recognized as a voice on AI in mental health.
~10 years in complex data systems, machine learning, and full-stack development, including anonymizing sensitive data. The technical answer to a problem that was previously unfeasible.
For a working therapist, Mentalyc aims to collapse the after-session admin pile into a few clicks - and then quietly build a longer-term picture of each client.
Transcribes sessions and generates HIPAA-compliant progress notes across formats and templates - the core time-saver.
Builds client-centered treatment plans and goals drawn directly from what was said in session.
Captures client change over time from recordings, giving a longitudinal view without extra paperwork.
Measures therapeutic alliance from a recording using 30+ psychosocial markers - feedback modeled on a clinical supervisor.
Maria Szandrach and Georgi Urumov team up around a single, sharp problem: therapy notes break the therapeutic connection.
Reported seed funding (~$100K-$105K) with backing tied to Berkeley SkyDeck, Berlin Innovation Agency, and Entrepreneurs First.
Expands beyond note-taking into treatment planning and progress tracking - the platform ambition made explicit.
Billed as the first AI tool to measure and strengthen therapeutic alliance from session recordings.
| Legal name | Mentalyc Inc. |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founders | Maria Szandrach (CEO), Georgi Urumov |
| Category | AI · Health · SaaS · Enterprise |
| Team size | ~26 employees |
| Funding | Seed - reported ~$100K-$105K (2022) |
| Backers | Berkeley SkyDeck, Berlin Innovation Agency, Entrepreneurs First |
| Model | B2B SaaS subscription · tiered plans · 14-day free trial |
| Competitors | Blueprint, Upheal, Eleos Health, Freed, and general AI scribes |
Mentalyc runs on a short list of stated values, and in a category where a single breach can end a company, the last one is not decoration.
"We learn by doing."
"We build with purpose."
"We do it together."
"We guard data and earn trust."
A walkthrough of how Mentalyc surfaces therapeutic-alliance insights from a session.
Maria Szandrach on the origin story and why documentation is the wedge.