Glowe Pavilion Completes Tens of Millions RMB Series A+ Financing to Empower Psychological Counseling with Generative AI

VCBeat (WeChat: vcbeat) has learned that Glowe, an online professional psychological counseling platform, recently announced the completion of its tens-of-millions-yuan A+ round of financing. This round was led by FreeS Fund.

Glowe Attic App, founded in 2021, is an online psychological counseling project targeting urban young people, primarily serving individuals with mild to moderate depression and anxiety.

Over the past year, the “Glowe Attic” platform has accumulated tens of thousands of paying users and provided tens of thousands of counseling sessions. Through scientific assessment methods, clients who engaged with the program for 4–6 weeks experienced a 284% increase in well-being and a 46% reduction in anxiety levels compared to pre-counseling baselines, demonstrating significant efficacy.

Unlike traditional psychological counseling platforms, Glowe Attic is not content with merely serving as a matchmaking platform connecting counselors and clients. Instead, it aims to standardize the entire counseling process. Grounded in evidence-based theoretical frameworks, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Interpersonal Therapy (IPT), Glowe Attic provides clients with “standardizable” and “measurable” counseling services.

Liu Qiuyang, founder of Gelou, stated that the current psychological counseling industry still has many unmet needs on both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side, counselors’ competencies vary widely, leading to inconsistent service quality. On the demand side, offline institutions struggle to meet clients’ “immediate” counseling needs arising from various stressful events. Moreover, for most young people, online counseling can effectively reduce “stigma,” making them more willing to take the first step in seeking help.

Gelu primarily employs Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which offers the advantages of quantifiable and evaluable efficacy, as well as relatively rapid onset of therapeutic effects. Meanwhile, Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) enables evidence-based classification based on clients’ multidimensional attributes, thereby facilitating the standardization of counseling protocols. Additionally, the Gelu platform provides counselors with regular training in counseling theories, professional development, and clinical supervision to ensure that all clients receive standardized and professional counseling services.

With the surge in popularity of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, how AIGC capabilities can empower the psychological counseling industry has become a topic of significant industry attention. In this regard, Liu Qiuyang stated that Gezi has been exploring the implementation of AIGC in its products since last year.

Gelu has integrated OpenAI’s large language model, GPT-3, into its products, transforming AI capabilities into an assistive tool for counselors. Specifically, the fine-tuned generative AI helps counselors generate clinical consultation memos and provides supportive counseling strategies, such as determining which of a client’s multiple issues should be prioritized for intervention and identifying which therapeutic techniques would yield better outcomes. Meanwhile, Gelu is further exploring supervision tools based on the GPT-3 model, with the aim of effectively serving as a copilot for counselors during the consultation process.

All of this is built upon GeLou’s standardized service system, which provides high-quality data for model training. While fully protecting client privacy, GeLou has established a mature debugging mechanism by leveraging systematic information and feedback from end-users. This component of the model helps enhance counselors’ professional competence, thereby enabling clients on the platform to receive higher-quality services.

Liu Qiuyangstated: “Applying AI capabilities on the basis of ethical compliance and protection of user privacy and security is the fundamental prerequisite for the viability of business models in the psychological counseling industry; therefore, leveraging systematic data for feedback constitutes a highly complex and critical engineering challenge.”

GeLou’s founder, Liu Qiuyang, graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. The core technical team hails from leading internet companies such as Tencent and Alibaba, while over 65% of the operations staff hold master’s degrees or higher in psychology. As serial entrepreneurs in the internet and psychological counseling sectors, the team previously launched Tell App in 2019, a mental health support platform for adolescents, which has accumulated over 4 million registered users.

Liu Qiuyang stated that Gezi will invest the funds from this round of financing into enhancing its AIGC application, which is expected to improve consultant work efficiency by 1–2 times.

Shen Ying, Vice President of FreeS FundIt is stated that the Ge Lou team is a rare group with a computer science background in the psychological counseling sector. By applying AI technology, they aim to enhance efficiency on the supply side (counselors), address industry pain points, and refine psychological counseling services into standardized, productized offerings, ultimately improving the consumer consultation experience.