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Text | Zhang Zhuoqian

Editor | Yuan Silai

36Kr learned that "Xinyue Intelligence" announced the completion of a million-yuan seed round of financing, with investors including professors of psychology from Sun Yat-sen University and Guangzhou University, as well as individuals such as heads of well-known investment institutions. This round of financing will mainly be used for product research and development.

The "Xinyue Intelligence" team was formed in early 2023 and began to try to use AI to assist the psychology industry. It was officially established in 2024. It is an artificial intelligence-assisted software for mental health professionals. It can provide AI tools + customer management platform, covering psychological assessments for visitors, post-conference dialogue summaries, personal professional growth of counselors, and customer management. The "Xinyue Intelligence" applet was officially launched in February this year. Currently, there are nearly 10,000 registered users. The web version is expected to be launched in August.

"Xinyue Smart" applet

According to statistics, there are more than 1.5 million certified psychological counselors in my country, but only 300,000 people are actually engaged in the psychological counseling industry. Faced with a large group of people who need psychological intervention, there is a huge gap in psychological counselors. Unlike other industries, psychological counseling is a profession that requires lifelong learning, continuous learning exchanges and knowledge updates. Even veterans with 10 years of consulting experience still have to invest a lot of time in learning and training every year. This is an industry with high income and high expenditure. For a novice in the industry, the most critical and torturous thing is to successfully get through the novice period.

Lu Jinhao, founder of "Xinyue Intelligence", introduced that novice counselors rely heavily on a large number of case consultation practices to transform theory into practice and consolidate their professional level. However, due to the embarrassing new identity and limited visiting resources, novices lack practical opportunities. Usually, a consultation lasts only 50 minutes, but the psychological counselor needs 2 to 3 hours to organize the content of the conversation and output a report. In addition, what is not known to the public is that psychological counseling work seems to be only a counselor serving the visitor, but in fact, there is an important role behind each consultation-"supervision" to control the consultation plan and quality and effect. Formal "supervision" resources are very scarce for psychological counselors, and psychological counselors also need to pay 700 to 800 supervision fees each time, which is a stressful challenge for junior psychological counselors.

Based on these pain points in the psychological counseling industry, Xinyue Intelligence has developed Xiaoqingzhidao AI, a service software for psychological counselors. The software includes five functions: AI co-listening, AI visiting, AI assessment, AI supervision, and customer EHR management system.

AI co-listening is a tool for intelligent transcription and summary of interview conversations. With the help of AI, it can quickly transcribe verbatim transcripts, deeply analyze the content of the conversation, generate record reports, and understand customer problems more efficiently and systematically. AI visits can solve the problem of lack of practice opportunities for novice counselors. By simulating a variety of visitor roles, anthropomorphic dialogues and practical training can be completed, truly achieving "even chatting is learning and progress." AI assessment is a psychological screening tool that assists counselors in conducting a comprehensive assessment of customer problems during initial interviews and first visits. AI supervision is an intelligent expert tool that partially replaces real-person supervision and provides counselors with professional answers and personal support. The customer EHR management system provides a "one-stop" workflow service system for psychological counselors, from co-listening reports, evaluation results to supervision analysis and meeting invitations.

At the same time, "Xinyue Intelligence" has also built a psychological service platform to provide professional psychological knowledge bases and training courses for psychological counselors. Lu Jinhao told 36Kr that the biggest challenge facing the psychological counseling industry is not a technical problem, but an ethical problem. How to ensure the privacy and security of visitors with the intervention of artificial intelligence is particularly important. "All our recording files will be deleted after AI analysis, and users can also choose to delete the data stored on the platform at any time. We strictly follow internationally recognized personal data protection standards such as ISO 27018, HIPAA and DPA." In addition, "Xinyue Intelligence" has developed an online agreement signing function for recording agreements between counselors and visitors to simplify the signing process between counselors and visitors and ensure the security of each other's information.

In terms of technology, Xinyue Intelligence independently developed a super-anthropomorphic model that can simulate the symptoms of real-life visits to help counselors practice. At the same time, based on the open source model, Xinyue Intelligence made fine adjustments and combined with a large amount of professional knowledge base in the field of psychological counseling to build an AI model that deeply understands counseling scenarios and provides deep personalized support for major schools.

The service software Xiaoqingzidao AI of "Xinyue Intelligence" has two main business models. One is To C, which is aimed at individual psychological counselors, and charges differentiated fees according to the service level of AI tools on a monthly/quarterly/yearly basis. The other is To B, which is aimed at school organizations and psychological counseling institutions, providing them with standardized EHR services or customized AI psychological services.

The founding team of "Xinyue Intelligence" is composed of Internet technicians and psychology experts. The founder Lu Jinhao is a serial entrepreneur in the psychology industry and the founder of the Youni Qingxin Psychology Platform. The technical team comes from Internet giants such as Tencent and Baidu. The advisory team is composed of Lai Huimei, president of the Hong Kong Mental Health Association, and professors from Guangzhou University and Sun Yat-sen University.

Next, "Xinyue Smart" plans to replace the text interaction in the current AI visitor function with voice calls. This year, the target number of registered users of the software is 50,000. The web version of "Xinyue Smart" is currently under development and is expected to be officially launched this month.

Investor’s view:

In the current living environment with widespread work pressure and huge social pressure, the demand for psychological counseling is very strong. However, compared with the rapidly growing downstream demand, the growth rate of the psychological counselor team seems to be a bit "incapable". "Xinyue Intelligence" has gone deep into the industry and discovered several major pain points faced by the psychological counseling industry, especially early practitioners, and has developed a series of AI-based products, focusing on improving the work efficiency of practitioners and helping early counselors take the first step in improving their professional capabilities. The company has created a one-stop product and customer management platform that can effectively solve the aforementioned pain points. As an investor in the company, I highly recognize the potential social value that the company's products can create. In the process of contacting the team, we also deeply felt the team's youth, vitality and vigor. Under the leadership of founder Lu Jinhao, the company has developed rapidly, and basically completed the early product iteration and polishing work within a year. At present, the company's products have been registered and used by tens of thousands of people without commercial promotion. These have also strengthened investors' confidence in the company's future development. I believe that with the completion of this round of financing, the company can accelerate the improvement of its product series and create China's first one-stop service platform based on AI and fully oriented to psychological counselors, so as to make contributions to social and industry development at an early date.