When Saroosh Khan left his hometown of Talagang for Karachi’s Institute of Business Administration on a full scholarship, he never imagined he would one day raise millions of dollars in Silicon Valley to tackle one of the world’s toughest challenges: making mental-health care personalized, precise and accurate. Today the 27-year-old is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Allia Health, an AI-powered platform that promises to eliminate boring paperwork for therapists and give them clinical insights at the point of care. This allows providers to spend more time providing support instead of being buried in administrative tasks.Backed by leading US investors—Tim Draper’s Draper Associates, Boost VC, the Oxford University Seed Fund and Arben Ventures from Stanford—Allia has already secured US $2 million and is piloting with hundreds of clinicians in the United States.“Mental-health has always been built around billing,”“We flipped that to make it more about the outcomes. Allia automates the boring stuff and surfaces data that actually helps providers make better decisions for patients.”After product roles in fintech and health-tech, he met Oxford-educated founder Amie Leighton, whose own experiences with anorexia and ADHD convinced her that treatment still relies too heavily on guesswork. The pair bonded over a simple idea: put clinicians first, utilize every data stream—session transcripts, wearables, electronic health records—and turn it into usable insights whenever needed.Allia records therapy sessions, transcribes them, and combines the language cues with biometric data from devices like Fitbit or Oura. Proprietary algorithms then draft progress notes, flag symptom changes and suggest evidence-based interventions—all within an intuitive interface. Early users report cutting admin time by more than 80 percent.Allia is finalising research collaborations with Stanford and King’s College London to validate its precision-driven approach and explore further venues of research.
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