Bringing Mental Health Care to Young People Using AI Responsibly
Using conversational AI to enable early psychological interventions
About Us
Scalable, cost-effective psychological interventions to improve mental health in young people
We are blessed with the opportunity to improve the mental health of millions of young people, through early, real-time, psychological interventions, using conversational AI. We are responsibly developing an authentic and transparent chatbot using conversation driven development to automatically predict and personalise what relatable, professional therapists would say in equally relatable, highly nuanced situations.
We are a small group of professional mental health providers, engineers and academics with decades of qualified psychotherapy and machine learning experience. We are building a certified medical device in an agile and careful manner; the “St Johns Ambulance” of social media platforms, for a safer, healthier metaverse.
Trained by humans, tested on humans.
We are a Cambridge University spin-out, an early stage start-up, with pre-seed funding.
Supporting Vulnerable Young People
Mental health is often only considered when it’s in a state of decline, but the reality is that good mental health requires ongoing maintenance and attention. With internet usage becoming alarmingly damaging to young people and professional wait lists growing longer, preventative care is more important than ever.
Cam AI aims to deliver this in an accessible and scalable way using Chatbot technology and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques. Adolescents are frequently navigating the internet without any skills to understand or protect themselves. This can lead to undesirable mindsets and self-destructive behaviours aided by very little coping skills.
Providing a tool for teens and young people to build resilience and give them someone to speak to whenever they need support is so important, especially given the limited capacity of therapeutic care.
Trustworthy Tools
Asimov noticed robots as either a menace or a victim; whilst still a dominating literary device and perspective among those suffering existential crises, he also recognised them as efficient, helpful mechanisms, available 24/7. Automation has occurred for millennia, fulfilling some jobs and creating others – conscientious data processing will always be required. Over the last 70 years, automation has been used to increase efficiency and in turn, our confidence in the prediction of information.
Having been juxtaposed with humanity, to creating virtual worlds, to entering into our world, The Algorithm is now slipping into the background. As we move from a recapitulation of the fusion of structured models and black-box algorithms, into a new era of AI that is all about the data, Cam AI is leading the way towards responsible data curation, as we build conversational AI for mental health support.
At the nexus of AI and adolescent mental health, our chatbot, by learning from examples of mental health support, is guided to predict your mental state and the most appropriate thing to say next. We achieve authentic, relatable examples through continuous user evaluation and controlled, secure curation of our anonymous data whilst tracking its provenance. We use large language models that capture the generative structure of dialogue, not just discriminate between potential decisions, to enable accurate and precise predictions that explain how a conversation could evolve. Through all this, combined with our compliant software engineering processes and scientific rigour, we gain the trust to connect our community.
Channelling humanity through our transparent technological tools in this way, connects the appropriate people through their experience; how we characterise our tools in terms of their scope of service and effectiveness manages users’ expectations and allows support to blossom.
Team
Robert Batt – Founder and Chief Executive
My role is to lead the organisation and to manage the mission and vision of Cam AI. I have spent more than 20 years providing clinical support for adolescent patients. I founded TRC Group, which has a multidisciplinary team of 40 clinicians in 3 private Adolescent Daycare clinics, in London, Edinburgh and Riyadh.
I have a clear understanding into the aetiology of mental ill-health amongst adolescents, together with 2 decades of experience in helping this patient group to recover.
In addition to my extensive psychology and psychotherapy training, I have a Masters in Entrepreneurship from Darwin College, Cambridge. I have conducted novel research into “The role of Embodied Conversational Agents in reducing an adolescent mental health crisis” and I am a member of the Cambridge Neuroscience Networks and the British Neuroscience Association.
Professor Sabine Bahn – Co-Founder
I have dedicated more than 25 years to researching the molecular basis of mental illness, co-authoring more than 200 research papers on disorders including bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. My research group has contributed to launching the world’s first commercially available diagnostic aid for schizophrenia in collaboration with the NASDAQ-listed diagnostics company Myriad Genetics Inc.
As co-founder of Psyomics Ltd, and head of the Cambridge Centre for Neuropsychiatric Research, I lead a team of scientists working on developing blood-based tests for bipolar disorder and major depression, as well incorporating evidence-based mental health research into the development of our digital tools.
As a practicing psychiatrist at the Cambridge and Peterborough NHS trust, I have direct experience of the clinical need for new digital and biological tools for tackling some of the fundamental challenges in mental health operations, including the development and implementation of a highly sophisticated learning and development platform for clinicians that greatly strengthened the company’s value proposition.
Jem Davies – Co-Founder
I previously served 18 years at technology giant Arm where I held senior leadership team roles including vice-president, fellow and general manager for several businesses including their Machine Learning Group. In addition to setting future technology roadmaps, I also worked on several acquisitions leading to building new businesses inside Arm. I have a degree from the University of Cambridge and hold 4 patents in the fields of CPU and GPU design.
A highly skilled business leader and technologist, I have wide experience as non-executive director and chair across a variety of companies from for-profit, not-for-profit and industry standards bodies, including chair of the Numerical Algorithms Group. My passion is helping start-up businesses grow.
As an Integrative Psychotherapist I am able to offer a variety of therapies that allow me to tailor my sessions to every client’s need.
We will work together to establish a solid foundation as a result of an honest, respectful and trustworthy therapeutic relationship. I will offer you a safe and confidential space that will allow you to feel, express and process the feelings and difficulties you may be facing. Our sessions will help you develop improved coping strategies to manage your problems more effectively.
I have a master’s degree in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy, a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and have been working in the mental health field since 2012. My practice complies with the ethical and professional guidelines of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).
I am an integrative cognitive behavioural therapist with clinical experience and professional training in psychology, counselling, trauma, psychoeducational groupwork and CBT, all of which inform my ability to offer effective individualised therapy.
I provide a safe, confidential, and non-judgmental listening space where I can work collaboratively with individuals to develop an evidence-based therapeutic approach, empowering them to manage the mental health difficulties and life challenges they may be experiencing.
I have a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a diploma in CBT in Counselling and Group Work. I am also a registered member of the British Psychological Society and the BACP.
I am an Integrative Psychotherapist and I take a person-centered approach to therapy. I offer mental health and well-being support, with a contemporary and creative focus, to help people to understand and work through the psychological and emotional challenges they are facing. In turn, I hope to help people feel more empowered when taking care of their mental health.
I have a wide range of clinical experience working with children, young people, and adults and work with clients to create a safe, confidential, and non-judgmental space in which to feel, explore, express emotions, and work through challenges.
I have a master’s degree in Psychotherapy and Counselling: Contemporary Creative Approaches. I am an Accredited Registrant of the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society and a member of the BACP.
I am passionate about helping people to improve their emotional well-being and to connect to themselves and others. I have an extensive experience of working therapeutically with adults, adolescents, and children.
I believe there is no ‘one fits all’ approach and aim to tailor my work to suit the unique presentation of each client. Based on the client’s individual needs, we will collaboratively choose the most suitable and effective way of working. Regardless to the approach, I will provide my clients a safe and confidential space to explore their thoughts and feelings.
I am currently completing a Doctorate degree in Counselling Psychology. I hold a master’s degree in Psychology, as well as diplomas in Counselling and Psychotherapy. I am a registered member of the British Psychological Society and the BACP.
Hannah Bloomfield – Head of Psychology Operations
I am thrilled to be using all of my experience to develop a product that will improve the lives of teenagers and emerging adults. By integrating the experience of psychotherapists and industry professionals, my role is to build scripts, modules, and content for targeted concerns. Using research and a pragmatic approach I aim to deliver personalised care for many different conditions, meeting the needs of underserved youth.
Prior to my work here at Cam AI, I have a master’s degree in Clinical Child Psychology and over five years of experience working in an early stage startup environment.
Starting out in a client-facing role delivering mental health coaching, I helped hundreds of clients through a startup coaching app. I went on to develop management systems and procedures within the company to help improve the quality of coaching, training and development for emerging coaches, and continued education for employees.
I also have experience leading a clinical team which assessed the needs of the client base and worked directly with high risk users. This involved developing an appropriate scope of service for a text based app, creating personalised care plans, and collaborating with clients.
Dr Simon Fothergill – Engineering Lead
I am thankful to be privileged enough to be part of the team at Cam AI. I work with brilliant psychotherapists and mental health coaches, with decades of professional experience and get to help young people have a strong start.
My role at Cam AI is to lead the engineering effort towards providing personalised mental health care to adolescents. I direct the building of technology to automate the prediction of information that can shine a light in an explainable and trustworthy way.
With over 10 years of experience at a variety of AI tech start-ups, I’ve built and commercialised innovative data analysis software platforms, enabling business efficiencies and new understanding of our world.
I have focused on delivering deep natural language processing systems, including knowledge based conversational AI, computational models of qualitative human judgements and unstructured data driven forecasting and recommendation.
My work has been grounded by my Ph.D. in machine learning and sports coaching from the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, as well as my prize winning, 1st class Honours and Masters of Engineering in Computing from Imperial College, London; accredited by BSC and IEE. Before that I was at Bedales School.
I did a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Nottingham University, specialising in Natural Language Processing, and then completed my MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge.
As an NLP Engineer, I have experience in both research and product development. Prior to Cam AI, I worked at IBM, Amazon, Volemic, and Cambridge University Press and Assessment acquiring skills in software engineering, LLM research, and productionising ML models.
I am delighted to be part of the wonderful Cam AI team working with expert software engineers and mental health professionals to deliver early interventions and accessible mental health support.
Having graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, I am incredibly excited to be utilising the skills and knowledge I gained to improve the mental health support available for adolescents with the wonderful team at Cam AI.
I have developed my skills as a software engineer through an internship with Improbable Defence and my degree project on using machine learning in the drug discovery pipeline. Now, I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from such a talented and diverse group of people working with cutting-edge technologies.
I started my career working for global corporations in the music and film industry, but after an extended career break, decided to return to the workplace in a more flexible role virtually supporting SMEs. I love the variety of the work, as no two days are ever the same!
I provide the team with administrative and operational support, enabling them to focus on the complex engineering and psychology inputs required to build authentic conversational AI. As a parent to two teenagers I feel privileged to be able to play a small part in helping Cam AI address the growing mental health crisis facing our children.
After graduating from the University of Cambridge with a degree in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, I went on to complete an MSc in the Psychology of Economic Life at LSE.
I have been involved with several voluntary, community, and social innovation projects and am keen to utilise my passions for psychology, tangibly helping others, and interacting with people to pivot towards a career in mental health.
In the future, I would like to undertake a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and my internship at Cam AI is giving me important, rewarding, and relevant experience to help me pursue this goal. I am fascinated by the company’s mission and relishing the opportunity to be part of such an exciting start-up.
I am an undergraduate student of Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, approaching my final year of study. I have studied mental health and developmental psychology and have previously been involved in studies pertaining to adolescent mental health as part of an NHS focus group. My ambition is to be of assistance to the Cam AI team in achieving their goal of supporting young minds in need, with my unique experiences, perspective, and passion for this area of psychology.
I am incredibly grateful to work with the team at Cam AI. To be involved in the development of a tool that will become a crucial support for adolescents and their mental health is an invaluable opportunity.
Join Us
As a team we all believe in good mental health and making a positive impact in the world. Our start-up working environment is small, fast paced, and incredibly creative. We offer a hybrid working model with an office space in Cambridge, flexible working and unlimited PTO.
We are always on the lookout for talented and passionate people to join our team. Please feel free to drop us a speculative application if you are interested in working with us, but don’t see a role listed below that aligns with your skills and experience. We will happily discuss other potential or upcoming opportunities.
Vacancies
Head of Psychology Operations >>>>>
Please follow our LinkedIn page to be alerted to any new job posts.
Contact us at hiring@cam-ai.co.uk
Contact Cam AI
Cowley Rd,
Milton,
Cambridge
CB4 0WS