How Ellipsis Health is Making AI Empathetic

When Mainul Mondal first began thinking about the gaps in healthcare, it wasn’t as a technologist, but as a son. Mondal watched his mother's challenges with managing her depression and diabetes. In his own words, he wanted to "build something that’d make my mom less anxious and make her smile more”. Watching his mother, he noticed something deeply human missing in the system: someone to listen truly. Not just to her symptoms or prescriptions, but to her voice. Its pace, its tone, its hesitation. That insight would become the seed for Ellipsis Health, a company that’s now reimagining what it means for AI to care.

Ellipsis's main product, Sage, is an emotionally intelligent AI care manager that engages patients in natural voice conversations and assesses their mental and emotional well-being through advanced vocal biomarker analysis. Built on what the company calls an “Empathy Engine,” the technology monitors subtle changes in tone, rhythm, and speech patterns to detect signs of stress, anxiety, and depression, without needing a therapist or even a video call. All it takes is a simple voice interaction.

Unlike most conversational AI tools that rely on keyword triggers or scripted responses, Sage operates at a deeper level. It dissects speech down to acoustic and linguistic micro-signals: pitch variability, speech rate, pauses, intensity, or articulation. These are then fed into deep-learning models trained on millions of clinically annotated audio recordings. The result is a system that not only understands language but interprets affect -- an AI that hears someone say, “I’m fine,” and knows they’re not.

Furthermore, what really sets the technology apart is that it was designed to disappear. Patients don’t need to download an app, take a quiz, or type in symptoms. They just talk. And behind the scenes, the system picks up on how they’re really doing.

Funding and market

In June 2025, Ellipsis Health announced a $45 million Series A round led by Salesforce Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and CVS Health Ventures. The funding marked a major turning point, enabling the company to scale its emotionally adaptive platform across health systems, insurers, and digital care programs. It already counts Duke Health, Highmark, and Ceras Health among its partners, and integrates with Salesforce Health Cloud, to bring the technology into real-time care workflows. The ambition is bold: to make mental health as measurable and actionable as heart rate or blood sugar.

The need could hardly be greater. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, yet nearly 80% of people with mental health conditions remain undiagnosed or undertreated. Meanwhile, care managers are overwhelmed, especially in post-discharge scenarios where follow-up can mean the difference between recovery and relapse. Ellipsis steps into that void with 24/7 availability and scalable empathy. And, unlike most symptom checkers or text-based chatbots, Sage speaks in full sentences, modulates its own tone, and adapts in real-time to the emotional state of the person it’s speaking to.

Future steps

Mainul Mondal, who continues to lead Ellipsis as CEO, believes this blend of machine learning and clinical empathy is the future of care. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he put it simply: “If someone is angry, what do you do? You listen. You listen and you give a compliment back.” That, at its heart, is what Ellipsis is building: an AI that listens to understand, and not to just respond.

Looking ahead, Ellipsis is expanding its voice AI into condition-specific modules, such as tailored interactions for oncology patients, people with diabetes, and those in chronic care programs. The goal goes beyond checking in, but rather focuses on catching the subtle signs of deterioration before they escalate. More broadly, the team is working toward building what it calls a “vital sign for mental health”, or a persistent, passive monitor that allows providers to intervene earlier, more precisely, and with more compassion.

In a healthcare system often overwhelmed by scale and stripped of humanity, Ellipsis is betting that a little listening can go a long way. Not just to detect illness, but to restore trust. And it all starts with a voice.