The startup mpathic is building red-teaming AI models and chatbots for safety risks. Today it has customers across verticals, from frontier AI labs to customer service providers and healthcare companies. The company’s very first customer, however, was in the life sciences space, and the deal was scored by CEO and founder Grin Lord herself, thanks to some clever maneuvering.
The first customer was familiar with Lord’s previous work in fidelity monitoring (measuring how closely a therapist or provider follows the intended treatment protocol) and using natural language processing to evaluate the quality of medical providers and therapists from recordings. They wanted her to consult on their new product. She told them she’d do it — and would even do it for free — but they’d have to go through her new company, and the contract had to include a low-level subscription to their software.
To close that first sale, Lord had to do a lot of education to help the buyer understand the state of AI and what they were trying to do. They also had to get on the same page about how to ensure mpathic could meet the company’s compliance needs.
This almost tanked the deal: as a small startup, mpathic didn’t yet have the team for the kind of complex compliance this company required. Lord believes they were considering alternatives, including her colleagues from past companies. But the customer ultimately decided they could solve this hurdle through collaboration, and they worked closely with mpathic to ensure compliance and even funded trainings for the team.
Since Lord previously launched two startups in the natural language space, this wasn’t her first-ever “first customer” moment. But it still had those same high-stakes feelings. First came the validation: “Okay, they get it!” she said. Then came the realization: “Wow, they are going to pay for this!”
“As the deal went on, it became clear that the scale of what the company wanted to do required both our AI platform and our services to build custom classification and speech models with ground-truth validation. So what started as just wanting to talk to me grew into a small SOW and software contract, and then grew into a five-year, multimillion-dollar relationship,” she said.
From that first customer, mpathic has grown into one of two startups now shaping the field of chatbot safety. The other, Circuit Breaker Labs, runs its red-teaming on autonomous AI agents instead of human clinicians. Both think the other approach hits a wall. Read the piece by Sage Lazzaro on The Infinite Loop.
Grin Lord, founder and CEO of mpathic. Photo courtesy of mpathic.
