The mpathic team. (mpathic Photos)
The news: mpathic, a Seattle-area startup aiming to bring more empathy to the corporate communication landscape, landed a $4 million seed round.
The details: Founded in 2020 by a trained psychologist, the company’s enterprise software analyzes conversations happening in texts, emails, audio calls, and more. The idea is to help employees identify potential misunderstandings or misinterpretations in their communication, and adjust in real-time. Use cases include customer service, insurance claims, healthcare, and human resources software — “anywhere where empathic conversations impact key outcomes,” said CEO and co-founder Grin Lord, who previously described mpathic as “Grammarly for empathy.” The company has 12 employees.
mpathic CEO Grin Lord.
The leaders: Lord was previously chief clinical officer at Lyssn.io; a clinical product psychologist at Youper.ai; and a research scientist at the University of Washington. Before launching mpathic, Lord and the company’s architect Nic Bertagnolli started Empathy Rocks, which builds human connection using empathic AI through a gamified platform
The investors: Next Frontier Capital led the seed round, which also included Illuminate, Portland Seed Fund, Full-Circle, WXR Fund, Graham & Walker, and First Row Partners. Lord noted that all of the company’s lead investors in this round were women. “This wasn’t on purpose,” she said. “I met with a lot of different investors and we had multiple firms interested in leading or co-leading. The best partners all happened to have women leads.” mpathic has raised $5.2 million to date.
Go deeper: This startup aims to improve workplace conversations with ’empathy-as-a-service’ software
