Skip to main content

Our team

The credentials behind every conversation on The Path.

A neuroscientist CEO with 2,600+ research citations. The world’s most recognized coach. A Medical Director whose clinical research is reimbursed by Medicare. Researchers in machine learning, individual differences, and both clinical and counseling psychology. Every credential here shows up in the product.

Co-Founders

Clinical Team

Our Journey

The Path didn’t start as The Path. It started with a loss.

When CEO Anson Whitmer was 19, his uncle and best friend died by suicide. He went to graduate school for psychology and became an expert in mood disorders. During his postdoc, his cousin died the same way. He left academia. The field was making real progress on understanding mental illness; almost none of that progress was reaching the people who needed it.

He joined Calm as the founding data scientist and stayed through the scale-up, from a one-bedroom apartment to a $2 billion valuation, eventually leading data science and AI. There he met co-founder Tyler Sheaffer, Calm’s founding engineer and a member of the five-person executive team. Tyler, in Anson’s words, built the product “with his bare hands.”

Calm reached millions. It wasn’t reaching men. Men account for roughly 80% of suicides in the U.S., which means any approach to the suicide crisis that can’t reach men isn’t really an approach.

In 2022 they founded Dig Deep, Inc. and launched Mental, the first mental health app built for the kind of man who doesn’t do therapy and doesn’t use apps like Calm. Audio sessions taught by people like world heavyweight boxing champion Deontay Wilder. And, quieter at first, an early bet on AI therapy: a format that removed the objection that kept many men out of treatment in the first place — having to say it out loud, to another person.

The first two generations of the AI therapy helped people who stuck with them. Engagement was the problem. In late 2024, a third generation shipped on a new architecture and quickly became the most-used feature in the app. Men who had avoided therapy and mental health apps were doing regular work on themselves through an AI.

Limiting the technology to men in the U.S. was the wrong constraint. The same system already worked in 50 languages, and the need was the same everywhere.

Around that point, Tony Robbins reached out. He’d been thinking about how AI could carry his work beyond him, at greater scale than he’d reached in 45 years of live coaching. He’d sampled the market and said this was the best AI therapy he’d found. He asked about joining forces.

Mental still exists. More than 4 million messages have moved through its AI therapist. In April 2026, the team launched The Path on the same engine: built for everyone, available in 50 languages across the sessions and the entire app, and focused entirely on AI therapy. The product is a platform of AI therapists with different specialties and different styles. A Tony Robbins AI is on the way, so you can work a relationship issue with one therapist and a career goal with Tony at the same time.

See how their work shows up in the product.

Start Now How it works