How Kivira is Using AI to Solve Mental Health Misdiagnoses
Personal experience inspired Maria Carmona’s AI-powered company to revolutionize mental health diagnosis.
- By
- May 18, 2026
- Entrepreneurship
From her earliest days growing up in Venezuela, Maria Carmona, MBA ’25 (XP-94), knew that a close family member was suffering from mental health issues, with unstable moods that could flare up at any time.
“As an example, my parents were remarried and divorced three times,” Carmona says. Despite traveling to the US several times to take her family member to some of the nation’s best hospitals, nothing seemed to work. “The diagnoses ranged from panic attacks all the way up to schizophrenia. They were just based on whatever the clinician knew at the time.”
Finally, when Carmona was 15, clinicians at NYU Langone Health diagnosed her family member with bipolar disorder. With the right treatment, they got better in a matter of months. “All of our lives dramatically changed,” Carmona says.
Over a decade later, that harrowing experience inspired Carmona to create the mental health startup Kivira while studying in Booth’s Sokolov Executive MBA Program. The company’s app supports mental health diagnosis using AI and structured assessments that patients can complete in a primary care physician’s office.
In the last year, Carmona has been on a whirlwind journey. After winning the Global New Venture Challenge (GNVC) at Booth, she raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from Wellstar Health System. In May 2026, Kivira is expected to begin a pilot project with UChicago Medicine, building on early validation work and formal clinical workflows.
“We’re not just building a tool for primary care. We’re building diagnostic infrastructure for the entire healthcare system.”
— Maria Carmona
The Problem of Mental Health Misdiagnosis in Primary Care
For Carmona, growing up in an unstable family situation created an early desire for independence and self-sufficiency. She founded her first company, an online marketplace, at 17. “It was very scrappy,” she says. When hyperinflation wiped out her profits five years later, she pivoted to launch an art investment vehicle. Later, while living in Mexico City, she built and exited a fintech company for the Latin American wedding market.
For all the success she found as an entrepreneur, however, most of her ventures arose organically, if not haphazardly. She moved to the US to attend Booth in 2023, searching for more structure. “I needed more rigor in my approach,” she says.
She turned to her family’s challenges for her next venture idea. Her application essay to Booth was about the difficulties caused by her family member’s misdiagnoses. Now, with the freedom gained by the recent sale of her fintech company, she looked for a better answer. “Somewhere in my subconscious, I knew I wanted to solve this problem,” she says.
With every class she took at Booth—from strategy to finance—she found herself thinking through how she could apply the lessons to a company that would improve mental health diagnoses. Outside of class, she began doing research, discovering from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Institute of Mental Health that more than half of diagnoses are wrong.
“It’s devastating—for the physicians who are failing, for the patients who are suffering, and for the insurance companies who are just bleeding money paying for this trial and error,” Carmona says. “It’s a failure of the system.”
As she interviewed more than 300 physicians and behavioral health specialists, she discovered one reason for the huge discrepancy: More than 70 percent of patients are diagnosed in a primary care setting. Many primary care doctors often only take a few weeks of psychiatric training in medical school, and while they mean well, they have to make snap decisions during 15-minute assessments in their offices.
Even as Carmona saw a slew of telehealth and therapy platforms working to solve mental health problems downstream, she remained convinced that the real issue was upstream—getting the right diagnosis and treatment plan from the beginning.
How Kivira Uses AI and DSM-5 Standards for Clinical Accuracy
To address this problem, Carmona enlisted the help of psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, former president of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, who became her company’s chief medical director. Stanford professor Teddy Akiki joined Kivira as chief medical advisor and helped guide the development of an app based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5)—which he calls “the Bible for mental health diagnoses.”
Unlike most behavioral health assessments that provide only a binary result—either a patient does or doesn’t have a particular disorder—Kivira uses AI to integrate assessments for multiple different disorders at once and presents them in a user-friendly, gamified interface that narrows in on a diagnosis in as little as 5 to 15 minutes.
To distribute the app, Carmona focused on primary care doctors, who are incentivized to use tools that save time and improve efficiency. “Once a patient finishes the survey, the clinician gets a full report on who they are, what they’re suffering from, and a treatment plan,” Carmona says. At the same time, the app unlocks treatment codes for insurance, so the patient receives the improved diagnosis while the physician is reimbursed for the visit. And because diagnoses are based on the DSM-5, clinicians can have confidence in the outcome.
“Starting a company is messy, but Professor Rapp was a great mentor to help give our project more structure.”
— Maria Carmona
Scaling Kivira: $1.8M Pre-Seed Funding and Pilot Project
Even as Carmona finalized the approach, she knew that she needed to refine her pitch for the GNVC, a competition sponsored by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago that provides coaching to Executive MBA students in London, Hong Kong, and Chicago who found startups. Alyssa Rapp, adjunct associate professor of entrepreneurship, provided crucial guidance to Carmona’s team.
“Starting a company is messy, but Professor Rapp was a great mentor to help give our project more structure,” says Carmona. Her team won first place in the challenge, which included a $50,000 prize along with a boost in confidence and new industry connections that allowed Carmona to successfully pursue the idea after graduation.
Carmona originally approached Wellstar, a nonprofit health system with 400 locations across Georgia, as a venue in which to test the product; instead, the organization’s corporate venture capital arm offered to fund the company, leading a $1.8 million investment.
To validate the platform’s clinical efficacy, Kivira is partnering with Stanford Center for Precision Psychiatry and launching a pilot project with several healthcare systems, including UChicago Medicine. During clinical trials, patients will be diagnosed by a primary care physician or a behavioral health specialist before receiving a diagnosis from Kivira. Patients are evaluated under a randomized trial protocol. While the team is still awaiting results, preliminary data suggests Kivira provides better outcomes than diagnoses made by both primary care physicians and behavioral health specialists.
Carmona envisions a day where health systems and insurance companies embrace Kivira as an essential part of behavioral health diagnosis. “We’re not just building a tool for primary care,” she says. “We’re building diagnostic infrastructure for the entire healthcare system.” The app could be a game changer, she says, not only for medical settings, but also for companies and government agencies to provide mental health services for employees. She also hopes it will level the playing field for underserved populations that are typically underdiagnosed.
Most important for Carmona is helping families avoid the years of pain and struggle that her own experienced. “Knowing this is happening in real life, and that I’m spearheading it, has been incredible beyond words.”
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