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Startup Deep Dive : Wysa — an FDA breakthrough device on Rs 47 crore of revenue

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Wysa.

A chatbot with no human on the other end has passed a threshold few digital health products ever reach: an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, granted in May 2022 for an AI-led conversational tool treating chronic pain, depression and anxiety together. Yet the company that built it, Wysa, closed its most recent disclosed financial year — FY25, ending 31 March 2025 — on revenue of just ₹47.31 crore (roughly $4.9 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics).

That gap — a regulatory nod usually reserved for medical devices, sitting on top of a business smaller than a mid-sized Indian retail chain’s monthly sales — is the real story here. Wysa did not start as a chatbot at all. It took four product pivots, a founder’s own depression, and roughly 800 iterations before the company found the one thing that worked: a listener that never gets tired, never judges, and remembers nothing when you close the app.

Quick facts

Company Wysa (legal entity: Touchkin eServices Private Limited)
Founded Touchkin incorporated 19 January 2015, Bengaluru; the Wysa chatbot launched in 2016
Founder(s) Jo Aggarwal (CEO) and Ramakant Vempati (President)
Businesses AI-led mental health conversational agent with optional human coaching, licensed to employers, health plans and health systems, plus a free consumer app
Latest FY revenue ₹47.31 crore (~$4.9 million) in FY25 (year to 31 March 2025), up 18.0% year-on-year
Latest FY profit/loss Not disclosed for FY25; last confirmed figure is a net loss of ₹5.31 crore in FY21
Listed Private; no IPO announced as of September 2026
Market value / last valuation Not publicly disclosed since the July 2022 Series B; total funding raised exceeds $34 million across eight rounds as of May 2023
Key shareholders Founders Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati; institutional backers include Kae Capital, pi Ventures, W Health Ventures, HealthQuad and British International Investment

What they do

Wysa sells access to an AI chatbot, built around cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) techniques, that talks people through anxiety, low mood and stress, and can route them to a human coach or therapist when needed. It sells this in two ways at once: as a free, anonymous consumer app that anyone can download, and, increasingly, as a licensed benefit that employers, health insurers and health systems buy on behalf of their employees, members or patients. By the company’s own published figures, it has been used by more than six million people across roughly 95 countries through upwards of 500 million AI-led conversations (company-stated, Wysa Reports page, wysa.com).

The origin

Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati are a husband-and-wife team who left corporate jobs in the UK — Aggarwal at Pearson Learning Solutions, Vempati at Goldman Sachs International — and moved back to India in 2012 to look after family. Their first venture was Touchkin, incorporated on 19 January 2015 in Bengaluru, which used passive smartphone sensing — how someone types, moves and sleeps, read off phone sensors rather than self-reports — to flag signs of depression in family caregiving contexts. In early clinical testing the sensing model reportedly reached 90% accuracy at detecting depressive symptoms, according to Aggarwal’s own account (The Politic, interview published March 2018).

The insight that eventually became Wysa was not a new algorithm. It was a realisation about trust: people would rather tell an anonymous AI what they are feeling than have an app silently infer it from their phone usage and report it to someone else. That shift — from passive surveillance to something a person actively, anonymously confides in — is what turned a failing caregiving tool into a mental health product with a very different audience.

The struggle years

Touchkin’s caregiving app did not find a paying market. Aggarwal has described pouring marketing spend into user acquisition without a path to sustainability, calling the experience “a bottomless pit,” and has said the strain tipped her into her own burnout and depression while still running the company (The Politic, March 2018). She has said she then taught herself cognitive behavioural therapy to manage her own symptoms, and it was that experience — realising CBT is a learnable skill, not only a clinical treatment administered by a professional — that reframed what the product should be.

Getting there was not a single clean pivot. By the company’s own account, Wysa went through four major product changes and close to 800 iterations, built and discarded through direct listening to early users, before the anonymous chatbot format stuck (YourStory company profile). The Wysa app itself launched in 2016, a side project inside the still-struggling Touchkin, at a point when the company had no evidence yet that a chatbot — as opposed to sensor-based monitoring — was the more fundable, more usable idea.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Wysa’s history sits around its FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, granted in May 2022 for an AI-led conversational agent treating adults with chronic musculoskeletal pain alongside depression and anxiety (Healio, 13 May 2022; Wysa company blog, May 2022). The designation followed a peer-reviewed study published in JMIR Human Factors on 27 April 2022, which tracked 2,194 Wysa users who reported chronic pain. In the subsamples measured on standard clinical scales, mean depression scores (PHQ-9) fell from 13.22 to 10.03, and mean anxiety scores (GAD-7) fell from 12.02 to 9.04, both statistically significant changes (P<.001) with a medium effect size.

The numbers either side of that moment are stark. Before the designation, Wysa was one AI wellness app among a crowded field competing largely on app-store downloads. Two months after the FDA news, in July 2022, Wysa closed a $20 million Series B — at the time its largest round by a wide margin, more than triple its total funding raised up to that point. A regulatory signal built on a specific, published clinical result, not a broader growth metric, is what investors backed.

The money behind it

Two backers changed the company’s trajectory in documented ways. W Health Ventures’ Series A cheque was explicitly earmarked to build out Wysa’s employer and health-plan sales motion in the US, according to the company’s own funding announcement. HealthQuad’s Series B, with BII alongside it, funded expansion into the US, UK and India simultaneously and pushed Wysa toward regulated, clinically-validated products rather than a pure wellness app — the same period in which the FDA designation and NHS deployments landed. Total funding raised stood at more than $34 million across eight rounds as of Inc42’s May 2023 tracker; the company has not disclosed a post-Series B valuation from a primary source, so no specific figure is used here.

How it makes money

Wysa does not publish its per-contract pricing or the exact split of revenue between enterprise licensing and consumer subscriptions, so no percentage figure is used here. What outside coverage and the client list consistently point to is that enterprise and health-system contracts, not app-store subscriptions, are the commercial core — the part a first-time user of the free app is unlikely to realise, since nothing in that experience signals that a corporate or NHS contract, not their own wallet, is what pays for the product.

The numbers

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net profit/(loss) (₹ crore)
FY20 (year to March 2020) 1.31 Not disclosed
FY21 (year to March 2021) 6.96 (5.31)
FY24 (year to March 2024, implied) ~40.1 (derived from FY25’s disclosed 18.0% YoY growth) Not disclosed
FY25 (year to March 2025) 47.31 Not disclosed

Revenue for FY20 and FY21 is as reported by Entrackr (14 July 2022), citing the company’s own filings; FY25 revenue and its 18.0% growth rate are as reported by TheCompanyCheck, an MCA-filings aggregator. Filings for FY22 and FY23 were not accessible for independent verification at the time of writing, and are left out rather than estimated; the FY24 figure shown is simple arithmetic on the disclosed FY25 growth rate, not a separately filed number, and is labelled accordingly. FY25 profit or loss was not available without a paid data subscription and is not reported here.

Where the money comes from

The surprise is where the growth is not coming from. Wysa’s biggest publicised user number — more than six million people, roughly 95 countries — is a consumer-app metric. But the contracts named in its own funding announcements and press coverage are almost entirely institutional: insurers, employers, hospital systems and a national health service, not individual app-store subscribers. A large free user base functions here mainly as a sales credential and a data source for clinical publications, rather than as a direct line to revenue.

The risks

The takeaway

Wysa’s founders did not arrive at a chatbot because they set out to build one. They arrived at it after a caregiving app built on passive phone-sensing failed to find buyers, after roughly 800 discarded iterations, and after the founder’s own depression taught her that what people wanted was not to be monitored but to be heard, anonymously, without consequence. The lesson that travels beyond mental health tech is about the nature of the pivot itself: the fix for a product that will not find product-market fit is sometimes not a better algorithm or more marketing spend, but a change in what the user is being asked to trust the product with. Wysa’s technology — conversational AI trained on CBT technique — existed in an earlier, failed form too. What changed was the relationship on offer.

Frequently asked questions

What does Wysa do?

Wysa is an AI chatbot built on cognitive behavioural therapy techniques that helps people manage anxiety, low mood and stress, with an option to connect to a human coach or therapist. It is sold both as a free consumer app and as a licensed benefit that employers, insurers and health systems provide to employees, members or patients.

Who founded Wysa, and when?

Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati founded the company as Touchkin, incorporated on 19 January 2015 in Bengaluru, before pivoting to the Wysa chatbot, which launched in 2016.

How much funding has Wysa raised, and from whom?

Wysa has raised more than $34 million across eight disclosed rounds as of May 2023, per Inc42’s funding tracker, including a $5.5 million Series A in May 2021 led by W Health Ventures and a $20 million Series B in July 2022 led by HealthQuad with British International Investment. Other backers include Kae Capital, pi Ventures and Google Assistant Investments.

Is Wysa FDA-approved?

Not fully. In May 2022, Wysa received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, which fast-tracks regulatory review, specifically for an AI-led conversational tool addressing chronic musculoskeletal pain with depression and anxiety. That is narrower than full market clearance and does not apply to Wysa’s other products.

How does Wysa make money if the app is free to download?

The free consumer app functions mainly as a funnel and a clinical-evidence base. The disclosed commercial core is enterprise and health-system licensing — contracts with employers, insurers and health systems such as Accenture, Aetna International, Swiss Re and the NHS in the UK — rather than individual consumer subscriptions.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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