3 Questions for Aury: »We Want to Make a Lasting Contribution to Mental Health«

Mr. Rank, your AI-based app Aury offers psychological counselling via chat. How far does the help go when someone turns to it with a problem?

At the moment, Aury is still intended for healthy people who do not have a diagnosed illness but are burdened by conflicts and stress in everyday life. Aury helps them recognise where their challenges lie and offers structured counselling and exercises to alleviate them. It works a bit like a session with a human coach or therapist. You go in with a problem and embark on a journey. Aury takes you by the hand and develops an agenda for future sessions to work on the problem. Mental health issues such as depression or anxiety disorders cannot be discussed with Aury at this time. Together with the Health and Medical University in Erfurt, we have developed a safety framework that monitors the course of the conversation and, in case of doubt, refers users to registered psychologists. However, our goal is to also help those who cross the threshold of illness in the future and to offer Aury as an app for psychotherapeutic and clinical use. We are currently working on this.

With Aury, we are responding to a huge gap in the provision of psychological counselling. Since 2000, psychological symptoms as a reason for days of incapacity for work have increased by 150 to 160 per cent. Given the cost debate we are having in the healthcare sector, it is very unlikely that we will have twice as many psychotherapists in the future. Aury aims to offer a solution here. At the moment, millions of people use Chat GTP to discuss their problems. We are working to provide a secure, competent AI solution based on expert knowledge. To do this, we use a database of psychological knowledge that we curate and supplement. We have a scientific advisory board that contributes its expertise. This ensures that the AI provides meaningful support to people with problems.

How did Aury come about and where do you want the app to be in a few years?

There are three of us in the founding team: Saskia Fester, a highly experienced clinical psychologist who oversees our product development; Robert Wasenmüller, who is responsible for the technical side; and myself as CEO. All three of us have worked in the health tech sector for a long time. When Chat GPT really took off two years ago, it was clear to us that now was the time to use AI for psychological counselling and develop a responsible product.

After our initial experiments with large language models, we decided to pursue multi-LLM approaches instead, probably the first to do so in the mental health sector. This involves several AI models working together like an orchestra, with each one taking on different tasks. At some point, you end up with a collection of different models that interact with each other – live during the session and also afterwards to prepare for the next session. This approach has been very well received over the past year and a half. We were fortunate to choose it very early on and are therefore now probably a few steps ahead.

At the moment, our beta version, which runs on WhatsApp, is still free of charge. From the turn of the year 25/26, there will be a full version available as an app. We hope to be able to bring Aury directly to people as a health insurance benefit, first as a certified prevention product that can be paid for retroactively, and later as a certified medical product. In the best-case scenario, in three years’ time, Aury will be used across Europe, and perhaps even worldwide, to provide support to healthy and sick people, both independently and as an accompaniment to therapy, hand in hand with human therapists. In this way, we want to make a lasting contribution to mental health.

Why did the Aury team decide to tackle the next stage of the company’s growth at Potsdam Science Park?

Many cogs are meshing here to promote the business landscape and innovation. We feel that the state of Brandenburg and the city of Potsdam are genuinely interested in our success here. We see this, for example, in the very strong funding landscape. We currently have several applications in progress – in addition to our financing from an angel consortium.
The Potsdam Science Park’s location management team also takes great care of the companies based here. We have always had a contact person who has guided us through the funding landscape and introduced us to the right people. It is incredibly helpful for us to receive this kind of support. The subsidised office space here at GO:IN, the events and consultations are invaluable to us, since we would not have the resources to organise such things ourselves. As soon as we launch our technology as a certified prevention product, we will be able to grow our team here to continue refining our technology. I hope that Aury will enjoy stable growth in Brandenburg.

Further information can be found at Aury-Website.

This blog and the projects carried out by Standortmanagement Golm GmbH at Potsdam Science Park are funded by the European Union and the State of Brandenburg.