{"id":50550,"topic":"ai","source":"Forbes","title":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","url_hash":"ac5fd4f2426320933638f434bb2c8e2bc57e5741","author":"","summary":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed Forbes","content":"Robyn Schlicher spent years trying to measure her own mind. After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.\nThat distance between what patients sense and what medicine can measure is the problem Georgia Witchel set out to close. Her company, Mantis Biotech, makes a consumer software product called Parva that quietly reads how a person types and clicks, then flags cognitive change against that person's own history. The bet underneath it is deceptively simple: The right yardstick is not you against the population, but you against yourself.\nA Field That Stopped Innovating In The 1970s\nThe Monthly Appointment Can't See The Monthly Cycle\nCognitive care runs on a schedule that works against the biology it is meant to track. Witchel points out that treatment for conditions “like long COVID, dementia, perimenopausal syndrome is completely based on in-person appointments that will happen once a month at relatively random intervals.” A single monthly visit captures a mind at one arbitrary moment, then calls it a trend.\nFor women, that design flaw compounds. Symptoms shift with hormones and, as Witchel notes, “your emotions, your ability to self-regulate, is going to fluctuate with your hormones, with your monthly cycle.”\nThe stakes are not marginal. A 45-year-old woman carries a 1 in 5 lifetime risk of Alzheimer's, double the 1 in 10 a man faces. Women were also found 31% more likely to develop long COVID than men in the federal RECOVER study.\nThe Baseline Is The Breakthrough\nAn AI That Compares You Only To Yourself\nMost medical algorithms learn what “normal” looks like from large populations, and those populations were skewed toward males for decades. Parva throws that reference frame out. It installs on a laptop and reads passive signals—keystroke latency, mouse movement, how long attention lingers on a tab, how quickly someone answers a loved one—then stores them in a HIPAA-compliant database and weighs each day against the user's own earlier readings.\nThe shift reframes diagnosis itself. Take ADHD, widely missed in women because the criteria were built on boys. Witchel says Parva asks whether a woman improved against her own pattern, “rather than... the traditional method, which is just, do they fit into a traditional male pool as diagnosable as ADHD.”\nWhat It Feels Like To Use\nSchlicher signed up on the spot. “Parva determined my baseline upon joining, and now I let it work in the background as I work, with no need for wearable or invasive devices,” she explains.\nNotably, Witchel resists the women's health banner even as she builds squarely for it. She would rather treat these problems, in her words, “as like gaps in health, and women just like our lower baseline,” which is precisely why they stand to gain the most.\nFrom Torn Tendons To Brain Fog\nHow Injury-Prediction Tech Became Cognitive Care\nWitchel did not start in neurology. She built physics simulations to predict when bodies break, work that pulled her into professional sports because, as she puts it, “the number one buyer of a physical simulation of a human is someone who really, really cares if a human is going to get injured, and that is a pro athlete.”\nThen she followed the misery to a bigger market. The total economic burden of dementia reached roughly $781 billion in 2025, while depression costs U.S. employers an estimated $187.8 billion a year.\nWhy Physics Beats Pure Statistics\nHer technical wager is that pattern-matching AI flattens the very people who most need to be seen. “Statistical AI really breaks down at the individual level. It's really, really good at predicting populations,” she argues. The analogy she reaches for sticks: Ask an image model for a face, and “it'll give you a perfect human face. AI is very, very bad at doing uneven faces.”\nInvestors bought the thesis. Jon Sakoda of Decibel, who led the round, observes that “the next frontier will be models that understand each person as an individual. Mantis shows what's possible.”\nA New Sector, Still Being Drawn\nThe Market, The Money, And The Competition\nMantis has raised $7.4 million in funding, led by Decibel, with Y Combinator and Liquid 2 participating. The company straddles three young markets whose edges are still soft: digital biomarkers, forecast to reach $17.73 billion by 2031, according to Markets and Markets; behavioral biometrics, projected at $11.38 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence; and healthcare digital twins, headed toward $3.55 billion by 2030, according to AppInventiv.\nIts nearest rivals cluster in digital biomarkers, among them Mindstrong, Altoida, and Evidation Health, though most chase a single signal or a single disease. For scale, the clinical digital-twin company Unlearn AI has raised more than $130 million, more than seventeen times Mantis's seed. Parva, meanwhile, bundles its continuous monitoring platform with lab coordination and the maddening work of finding the right specialist.\nWhere To Get Parva\nAccess runs through clinics that manage long-term cognitive conditions rather than a pharmacy shelf. Witchel's team places Parva with ADHD and executive-function clinics, outpatient psychiatry practices, and therapy practices treating depression, burnout, ADHD or neurodivergence. Perimenopause clinics and neurology practices round out the current channels, matching the software to the specialists patients already see for the conditions it tracks.\nA Baseline Of One\nParva is not a cure and, legally, it is not yet a diagnosis. Mantis flags risk levels and defers the verdict, telling users “this is the chance” rather than handing down a sentence, a boundary Witchel draws on purpose while the company works toward FDA clearance and reimbursement.\nWhat it offers instead is memory. For patients like Schlicher, whose decline was once visible only to herself, a continuous record of who she was yesterday changes the conversation with every doctor she sees. “I consider it a priceless gift for my overall health and ability to run my business,” she says.\nThe larger promise is harder to price. If a baseline of one can catch what population averages miss, the people medicine has historically measured last may finally get measured first.","image_url":"https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/6a6c6f723837903ce019f39f/0x0.jpg?format=jpg&height=900&width=1600&fit=bounds","lang":"en","published_at":"2026-07-31T11:00:21+00:00","fetched_at":"2026-07-31T11:15:05+00:00","status":"read","starred":0,"extract_state":"ok","summary_auto":"After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.","cluster_id":null,"extract_retries":0,"extract_error":null,"contract_version":"news_item.v1","format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1","dedup_url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320,"usable_text_length":6468,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320}},"news_item":{"id":50550,"canonical_url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","source_url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","title":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed - Forbes","source_name":"Forbes","author":null,"published_at":"2026-07-31T11:00:21+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"rss_summary":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed Forbes","full_text":"Robyn Schlicher spent years trying to measure her own mind. After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.\nThat distance between what patients sense and what medicine can measure is the problem Georgia Witchel set out to close. Her company, Mantis Biotech, makes a consumer software product called Parva that quietly reads how a person types and clicks, then flags cognitive change against that person's own history. The bet underneath it is deceptively simple: The right yardstick is not you against the population, but you against yourself.\nA Field That Stopped Innovating In The 1970s\nThe Monthly Appointment Can't See The Monthly Cycle\nCognitive care runs on a schedule that works against the biology it is meant to track. Witchel points out that treatment for conditions “like long COVID, dementia, perimenopausal syndrome is completely based on in-person appointments that will happen once a month at relatively random intervals.” A single monthly visit captures a mind at one arbitrary moment, then calls it a trend.\nFor women, that design flaw compounds. Symptoms shift with hormones and, as Witchel notes, “your emotions, your ability to self-regulate, is going to fluctuate with your hormones, with your monthly cycle.”\nThe stakes are not marginal. A 45-year-old woman carries a 1 in 5 lifetime risk of Alzheimer's, double the 1 in 10 a man faces. Women were also found 31% more likely to develop long COVID than men in the federal RECOVER study.\nThe Baseline Is The Breakthrough\nAn AI That Compares You Only To Yourself\nMost medical algorithms learn what “normal” looks like from large populations, and those populations were skewed toward males for decades. Parva throws that reference frame out. It installs on a laptop and reads passive signals—keystroke latency, mouse movement, how long attention lingers on a tab, how quickly someone answers a loved one—then stores them in a HIPAA-compliant database and weighs each day against the user's own earlier readings.\nThe shift reframes diagnosis itself. Take ADHD, widely missed in women because the criteria were built on boys. Witchel says Parva asks whether a woman improved against her own pattern, “rather than... the traditional method, which is just, do they fit into a traditional male pool as diagnosable as ADHD.”\nWhat It Feels Like To Use\nSchlicher signed up on the spot. “Parva determined my baseline upon joining, and now I let it work in the background as I work, with no need for wearable or invasive devices,” she explains.\nNotably, Witchel resists the women's health banner even as she builds squarely for it. She would rather treat these problems, in her words, “as like gaps in health, and women just like our lower baseline,” which is precisely why they stand to gain the most.\nFrom Torn Tendons To Brain Fog\nHow Injury-Prediction Tech Became Cognitive Care\nWitchel did not start in neurology. She built physics simulations to predict when bodies break, work that pulled her into professional sports because, as she puts it, “the number one buyer of a physical simulation of a human is someone who really, really cares if a human is going to get injured, and that is a pro athlete.”\nThen she followed the misery to a bigger market. The total economic burden of dementia reached roughly $781 billion in 2025, while depression costs U.S. employers an estimated $187.8 billion a year.\nWhy Physics Beats Pure Statistics\nHer technical wager is that pattern-matching AI flattens the very people who most need to be seen. “Statistical AI really breaks down at the individual level. It's really, really good at predicting populations,” she argues. The analogy she reaches for sticks: Ask an image model for a face, and “it'll give you a perfect human face. AI is very, very bad at doing uneven faces.”\nInvestors bought the thesis. Jon Sakoda of Decibel, who led the round, observes that “the next frontier will be models that understand each person as an individual. Mantis shows what's possible.”\nA New Sector, Still Being Drawn\nThe Market, The Money, And The Competition\nMantis has raised $7.4 million in funding, led by Decibel, with Y Combinator and Liquid 2 participating. The company straddles three young markets whose edges are still soft: digital biomarkers, forecast to reach $17.73 billion by 2031, according to Markets and Markets; behavioral biometrics, projected at $11.38 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence; and healthcare digital twins, headed toward $3.55 billion by 2030, according to AppInventiv.\nIts nearest rivals cluster in digital biomarkers, among them Mindstrong, Altoida, and Evidation Health, though most chase a single signal or a single disease. For scale, the clinical digital-twin company Unlearn AI has raised more than $130 million, more than seventeen times Mantis's seed. Parva, meanwhile, bundles its continuous monitoring platform with lab coordination and the maddening work of finding the right specialist.\nWhere To Get Parva\nAccess runs through clinics that manage long-term cognitive conditions rather than a pharmacy shelf. Witchel's team places Parva with ADHD and executive-function clinics, outpatient psychiatry practices, and therapy practices treating depression, burnout, ADHD or neurodivergence. Perimenopause clinics and neurology practices round out the current channels, matching the software to the specialists patients already see for the conditions it tracks.\nA Baseline Of One\nParva is not a cure and, legally, it is not yet a diagnosis. Mantis flags risk levels and defers the verdict, telling users “this is the chance” rather than handing down a sentence, a boundary Witchel draws on purpose while the company works toward FDA clearance and reimbursement.\nWhat it offers instead is memory. For patients like Schlicher, whose decline was once visible only to herself, a continuous record of who she was yesterday changes the conversation with every doctor she sees. “I consider it a priceless gift for my overall health and ability to run my business,” she says.\nThe larger promise is harder to price. If a baseline of one can catch what population averages miss, the people medicine has historically measured last may finally get measured first.","excerpt":"After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.","extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320,"usable_text_length":6468,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320}}},"display_formats":["compact","card","full","digest_section","json"]},"daily_stack_record":{"title":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","summary":"After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.","source":"Forbes","date":"2026-07-31T11:00:21+00:00","content":"Robyn Schlicher spent years trying to measure her own mind. After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.\nThat distance between what patients sense and what medicine can measure is the problem Georgia Witchel set out to close. Her company, Mantis Biotech, makes a consumer software product called Parva that quietly reads how a person types and clicks, then flags cognitive change against that person's own history. The bet underneath it is deceptively simple: The right yardstick is not you against the population, but you against yourself.\nA Field That Stopped Innovating In The 1970s\nThe Monthly Appointment Can't See The Monthly Cycle\nCognitive care runs on a schedule that works against the biology it is meant to track. Witchel points out that treatment for conditions “like long COVID, dementia, perimenopausal syndrome is completely based on in-person appointments that will happen once a month at relatively random intervals.” A single monthly visit captures a mind at one arbitrary moment, then calls it a trend.\nFor women, that design flaw compounds. Symptoms shift with hormones and, as Witchel notes, “your emotions, your ability to self-regulate, is going to fluctuate with your hormones, with your monthly cycle.”\nThe stakes are not marginal. A 45-year-old woman carries a 1 in 5 lifetime risk of Alzheimer's, double the 1 in 10 a man faces. Women were also found 31% more likely to develop long COVID than men in the federal RECOVER study.\nThe Baseline Is The Breakthrough\nAn AI That Compares You Only To Yourself\nMost medical algorithms learn what “normal” looks like from large populations, and those populations were skewed toward males for decades. Parva throws that reference frame out. It installs on a laptop and reads passive signals—keystroke latency, mouse movement, how long attention lingers on a tab, how quickly someone answers a loved one—then stores them in a HIPAA-compliant database and weighs each day against the user's own earlier readings.\nThe shift reframes diagnosis itself. Take ADHD, widely missed in women because the criteria were built on boys. Witchel says Parva asks whether a woman improved against her own pattern, “rather than... the traditional method, which is just, do they fit into a traditional male pool as diagnosable as ADHD.”\nWhat It Feels Like To Use\nSchlicher signed up on the spot. “Parva determined my baseline upon joining, and now I let it work in the background as I work, with no need for wearable or invasive devices,” she explains.\nNotably, Witchel resists the women's health banner even as she builds squarely for it. She would rather treat these problems, in her words, “as like gaps in health, and women just like our lower baseline,” which is precisely why they stand to gain the most.\nFrom Torn Tendons To Brain Fog\nHow Injury-Prediction Tech Became Cognitive Care\nWitchel did not start in neurology. She built physics simulations to predict when bodies break, work that pulled her into professional sports because, as she puts it, “the number one buyer of a physical simulation of a human is someone who really, really cares if a human is going to get injured, and that is a pro athlete.”\nThen she followed the misery to a bigger market. The total economic burden of dementia reached roughly $781 billion in 2025, while depression costs U.S. employers an estimated $187.8 billion a year.\nWhy Physics Beats Pure Statistics\nHer technical wager is that pattern-matching AI flattens the very people who most need to be seen. “Statistical AI really breaks down at the individual level. It's really, really good at predicting populations,” she argues. The analogy she reaches for sticks: Ask an image model for a face, and “it'll give you a perfect human face. AI is very, very bad at doing uneven faces.”\nInvestors bought the thesis. Jon Sakoda of Decibel, who led the round, observes that “the next frontier will be models that understand each person as an individual. Mantis shows what's possible.”\nA New Sector, Still Being Drawn\nThe Market, The Money, And The Competition\nMantis has raised $7.4 million in funding, led by Decibel, with Y Combinator and Liquid 2 participating. The company straddles three young markets whose edges are still soft: digital biomarkers, forecast to reach $17.73 billion by 2031, according to Markets and Markets; behavioral biometrics, projected at $11.38 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence; and healthcare digital twins, headed toward $3.55 billion by 2030, according to AppInventiv.\nIts nearest rivals cluster in digital biomarkers, among them Mindstrong, Altoida, and Evidation Health, though most chase a single signal or a single disease. For scale, the clinical digital-twin company Unlearn AI has raised more than $130 million, more than seventeen times Mantis's seed. Parva, meanwhile, bundles its continuous monitoring platform with lab coordination and the maddening work of finding the right specialist.\nWhere To Get Parva\nAccess runs through clinics that manage long-term cognitive conditions rather than a pharmacy shelf. Witchel's team places Parva with ADHD and executive-function clinics, outpatient psychiatry practices, and therapy practices treating depression, burnout, ADHD or neurodivergence. Perimenopause clinics and neurology practices round out the current channels, matching the software to the specialists patients already see for the conditions it tracks.\nA Baseline Of One\nParva is not a cure and, legally, it is not yet a diagnosis. Mantis flags risk levels and defers the verdict, telling users “this is the chance” rather than handing down a sentence, a boundary Witchel draws on purpose while the company works toward FDA clearance and reimbursement.\nWhat it offers instead is memory. For patients like Schlicher, whose decline was once visible only to herself, a continuous record of who she was yesterday changes the conversation with every doctor she sees. “I consider it a priceless gift for my overall health and ability to run my business,” she says.\nThe larger promise is harder to price. If a baseline of one can catch what population averages miss, the people medicine has historically measured last may finally get measured first.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320,"usable_text_length":6468,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320}},"tags":[]},"fallback_formats":["markdown","json","html"],"actions":{"read":"/item/50550","export_markdown":"/api/items/50550/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/50550/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/"},"formats":{"full":{"id":50550,"title":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","source":"Forbes","author":null,"published_at":"2026-07-31T11:00:21+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"excerpt":"After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.","full_text":"Robyn Schlicher spent years trying to measure her own mind. After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.\nThat distance between what patients sense and what medicine can measure is the problem Georgia Witchel set out to close. Her company, Mantis Biotech, makes a consumer software product called Parva that quietly reads how a person types and clicks, then flags cognitive change against that person's own history. The bet underneath it is deceptively simple: The right yardstick is not you against the population, but you against yourself.\nA Field That Stopped Innovating In The 1970s\nThe Monthly Appointment Can't See The Monthly Cycle\nCognitive care runs on a schedule that works against the biology it is meant to track. Witchel points out that treatment for conditions “like long COVID, dementia, perimenopausal syndrome is completely based on in-person appointments that will happen once a month at relatively random intervals.” A single monthly visit captures a mind at one arbitrary moment, then calls it a trend.\nFor women, that design flaw compounds. Symptoms shift with hormones and, as Witchel notes, “your emotions, your ability to self-regulate, is going to fluctuate with your hormones, with your monthly cycle.”\nThe stakes are not marginal. A 45-year-old woman carries a 1 in 5 lifetime risk of Alzheimer's, double the 1 in 10 a man faces. Women were also found 31% more likely to develop long COVID than men in the federal RECOVER study.\nThe Baseline Is The Breakthrough\nAn AI That Compares You Only To Yourself\nMost medical algorithms learn what “normal” looks like from large populations, and those populations were skewed toward males for decades. Parva throws that reference frame out. It installs on a laptop and reads passive signals—keystroke latency, mouse movement, how long attention lingers on a tab, how quickly someone answers a loved one—then stores them in a HIPAA-compliant database and weighs each day against the user's own earlier readings.\nThe shift reframes diagnosis itself. Take ADHD, widely missed in women because the criteria were built on boys. Witchel says Parva asks whether a woman improved against her own pattern, “rather than... the traditional method, which is just, do they fit into a traditional male pool as diagnosable as ADHD.”\nWhat It Feels Like To Use\nSchlicher signed up on the spot. “Parva determined my baseline upon joining, and now I let it work in the background as I work, with no need for wearable or invasive devices,” she explains.\nNotably, Witchel resists the women's health banner even as she builds squarely for it. She would rather treat these problems, in her words, “as like gaps in health, and women just like our lower baseline,” which is precisely why they stand to gain the most.\nFrom Torn Tendons To Brain Fog\nHow Injury-Prediction Tech Became Cognitive Care\nWitchel did not start in neurology. She built physics simulations to predict when bodies break, work that pulled her into professional sports because, as she puts it, “the number one buyer of a physical simulation of a human is someone who really, really cares if a human is going to get injured, and that is a pro athlete.”\nThen she followed the misery to a bigger market. The total economic burden of dementia reached roughly $781 billion in 2025, while depression costs U.S. employers an estimated $187.8 billion a year.\nWhy Physics Beats Pure Statistics\nHer technical wager is that pattern-matching AI flattens the very people who most need to be seen. “Statistical AI really breaks down at the individual level. It's really, really good at predicting populations,” she argues. The analogy she reaches for sticks: Ask an image model for a face, and “it'll give you a perfect human face. AI is very, very bad at doing uneven faces.”\nInvestors bought the thesis. Jon Sakoda of Decibel, who led the round, observes that “the next frontier will be models that understand each person as an individual. Mantis shows what's possible.”\nA New Sector, Still Being Drawn\nThe Market, The Money, And The Competition\nMantis has raised $7.4 million in funding, led by Decibel, with Y Combinator and Liquid 2 participating. The company straddles three young markets whose edges are still soft: digital biomarkers, forecast to reach $17.73 billion by 2031, according to Markets and Markets; behavioral biometrics, projected at $11.38 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence; and healthcare digital twins, headed toward $3.55 billion by 2030, according to AppInventiv.\nIts nearest rivals cluster in digital biomarkers, among them Mindstrong, Altoida, and Evidation Health, though most chase a single signal or a single disease. For scale, the clinical digital-twin company Unlearn AI has raised more than $130 million, more than seventeen times Mantis's seed. Parva, meanwhile, bundles its continuous monitoring platform with lab coordination and the maddening work of finding the right specialist.\nWhere To Get Parva\nAccess runs through clinics that manage long-term cognitive conditions rather than a pharmacy shelf. Witchel's team places Parva with ADHD and executive-function clinics, outpatient psychiatry practices, and therapy practices treating depression, burnout, ADHD or neurodivergence. Perimenopause clinics and neurology practices round out the current channels, matching the software to the specialists patients already see for the conditions it tracks.\nA Baseline Of One\nParva is not a cure and, legally, it is not yet a diagnosis. Mantis flags risk levels and defers the verdict, telling users “this is the chance” rather than handing down a sentence, a boundary Witchel draws on purpose while the company works toward FDA clearance and reimbursement.\nWhat it offers instead is memory. For patients like Schlicher, whose decline was once visible only to herself, a continuous record of who she was yesterday changes the conversation with every doctor she sees. “I consider it a priceless gift for my overall health and ability to run my business,” she says.\nThe larger promise is harder to price. If a baseline of one can catch what population averages miss, the people medicine has historically measured last may finally get measured first.","reading_time_min":5,"extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320,"usable_text_length":6468,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320}}},"quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320,"usable_text_length":6468,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320}},"actions":{"read":"/item/50550","export_markdown":"/api/items/50550/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/50550/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/"}},"digest":{"id":50550,"title":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","source":"Forbes","topic":"ai","published_at":"2026-07-31T11:00:21+00:00","excerpt":"After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always…","quality_bucket":"high","quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","reading_time_min":5,"cluster_id":null},"card":{"display_title":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed - Forbes","subtitle":"Forbes · 2026-07-31","summary":"After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive…","badges":["quality:high"],"links":{"read":"/item/50550","original":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/"},"quality_warning":null},"export":{"title":"AI Cognitive Health Startup Mantis Biotech Rethinks How Women Are Diagnosed - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","summary":"After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.","source":"Forbes","date":"2026-07-31T11:00:21+00:00","content":"Robyn Schlicher spent years trying to measure her own mind. After a viral illness in 2020 left her with brain fog, memory gaps, and trouble reading, she tracked her decline the only way she could, by feel. “I was doing my best to assess changes in my mental state and cognitive ability qualitatively, based on how I felt, but it always seemed inaccurate and lacking,” she recalls.\nThat distance between what patients sense and what medicine can measure is the problem Georgia Witchel set out to close. Her company, Mantis Biotech, makes a consumer software product called Parva that quietly reads how a person types and clicks, then flags cognitive change against that person's own history. The bet underneath it is deceptively simple: The right yardstick is not you against the population, but you against yourself.\nA Field That Stopped Innovating In The 1970s\nThe Monthly Appointment Can't See The Monthly Cycle\nCognitive care runs on a schedule that works against the biology it is meant to track. Witchel points out that treatment for conditions “like long COVID, dementia, perimenopausal syndrome is completely based on in-person appointments that will happen once a month at relatively random intervals.” A single monthly visit captures a mind at one arbitrary moment, then calls it a trend.\nFor women, that design flaw compounds. Symptoms shift with hormones and, as Witchel notes, “your emotions, your ability to self-regulate, is going to fluctuate with your hormones, with your monthly cycle.”\nThe stakes are not marginal. A 45-year-old woman carries a 1 in 5 lifetime risk of Alzheimer's, double the 1 in 10 a man faces. Women were also found 31% more likely to develop long COVID than men in the federal RECOVER study.\nThe Baseline Is The Breakthrough\nAn AI That Compares You Only To Yourself\nMost medical algorithms learn what “normal” looks like from large populations, and those populations were skewed toward males for decades. Parva throws that reference frame out. It installs on a laptop and reads passive signals—keystroke latency, mouse movement, how long attention lingers on a tab, how quickly someone answers a loved one—then stores them in a HIPAA-compliant database and weighs each day against the user's own earlier readings.\nThe shift reframes diagnosis itself. Take ADHD, widely missed in women because the criteria were built on boys. Witchel says Parva asks whether a woman improved against her own pattern, “rather than... the traditional method, which is just, do they fit into a traditional male pool as diagnosable as ADHD.”\nWhat It Feels Like To Use\nSchlicher signed up on the spot. “Parva determined my baseline upon joining, and now I let it work in the background as I work, with no need for wearable or invasive devices,” she explains.\nNotably, Witchel resists the women's health banner even as she builds squarely for it. She would rather treat these problems, in her words, “as like gaps in health, and women just like our lower baseline,” which is precisely why they stand to gain the most.\nFrom Torn Tendons To Brain Fog\nHow Injury-Prediction Tech Became Cognitive Care\nWitchel did not start in neurology. She built physics simulations to predict when bodies break, work that pulled her into professional sports because, as she puts it, “the number one buyer of a physical simulation of a human is someone who really, really cares if a human is going to get injured, and that is a pro athlete.”\nThen she followed the misery to a bigger market. The total economic burden of dementia reached roughly $781 billion in 2025, while depression costs U.S. employers an estimated $187.8 billion a year.\nWhy Physics Beats Pure Statistics\nHer technical wager is that pattern-matching AI flattens the very people who most need to be seen. “Statistical AI really breaks down at the individual level. It's really, really good at predicting populations,” she argues. The analogy she reaches for sticks: Ask an image model for a face, and “it'll give you a perfect human face. AI is very, very bad at doing uneven faces.”\nInvestors bought the thesis. Jon Sakoda of Decibel, who led the round, observes that “the next frontier will be models that understand each person as an individual. Mantis shows what's possible.”\nA New Sector, Still Being Drawn\nThe Market, The Money, And The Competition\nMantis has raised $7.4 million in funding, led by Decibel, with Y Combinator and Liquid 2 participating. The company straddles three young markets whose edges are still soft: digital biomarkers, forecast to reach $17.73 billion by 2031, according to Markets and Markets; behavioral biometrics, projected at $11.38 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence; and healthcare digital twins, headed toward $3.55 billion by 2030, according to AppInventiv.\nIts nearest rivals cluster in digital biomarkers, among them Mindstrong, Altoida, and Evidation Health, though most chase a single signal or a single disease. For scale, the clinical digital-twin company Unlearn AI has raised more than $130 million, more than seventeen times Mantis's seed. Parva, meanwhile, bundles its continuous monitoring platform with lab coordination and the maddening work of finding the right specialist.\nWhere To Get Parva\nAccess runs through clinics that manage long-term cognitive conditions rather than a pharmacy shelf. Witchel's team places Parva with ADHD and executive-function clinics, outpatient psychiatry practices, and therapy practices treating depression, burnout, ADHD or neurodivergence. Perimenopause clinics and neurology practices round out the current channels, matching the software to the specialists patients already see for the conditions it tracks.\nA Baseline Of One\nParva is not a cure and, legally, it is not yet a diagnosis. Mantis flags risk levels and defers the verdict, telling users “this is the chance” rather than handing down a sentence, a boundary Witchel draws on purpose while the company works toward FDA clearance and reimbursement.\nWhat it offers instead is memory. For patients like Schlicher, whose decline was once visible only to herself, a continuous record of who she was yesterday changes the conversation with every doctor she sees. “I consider it a priceless gift for my overall health and ability to run my business,” she says.\nThe larger promise is harder to price. If a baseline of one can catch what population averages miss, the people medicine has historically measured last may finally get measured first.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/07/31/ai-cognitive-health-startup-mantis-biotech-rethinks-how-women-are-diagnosed/","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 6468 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320,"usable_text_length":6468,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":6468,"summary_length":320}},"tags":[],"format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1"}}}