A new Seattle-based health tech startup is rolling out a digital tool designed to take the paperwork load off mental health professionals.
Alpyne Labs this week introduced Juno, an AI-powered assistant built to manage time-consuming administrative tasks such as insurance benefits checks, billing, scheduling, and organizing clinical notes. The goal: free up therapists to spend more time with patients instead of wrestling with back-office work.
The company was co-founded by Justin Ith, a University of Washington graduate who previously worked with Madrona Venture Labs and launched a medical device company during the pandemic. Ith later returned to Madrona to spin out a healthcare billing automation startup in 2023. His co-founder, Michelle Arendas, brings two decades of experience in healthcare administration and now leads customer success at Alpyne.
Juno operates as a Chrome extension and integrates directly with leading electronic health record (EHR) platforms, including TherapyNotes, SimplePractice, and TheraNest. The tool appears as a floating widget and allows users to speak naturally to make requests, a style Ith compares to Iron Man’s Jarvis rather than old-school assistants like Siri or Alexa.
“People are learning to talk to Juno like they would a front desk assistant, full sentences, pauses, even banter,” Ith said.
For independent practitioners, administrative work can be overwhelming. Tasks like payment posting and managing zero-pay claims often involve repetitive manual steps, with errors leading to lost income. Juno is designed specifically for the mental health field, with payer rules, note templates, and workflows already built in. Installation takes less than an hour.
The tool arrives at a time when other Seattle startups are also innovating in digital health. Joon offers online therapy for youth, while NewDays applies generative AI to dementia care. Beyond healthcare, AI-driven automation tools like Caddi are targeting broader business tasks such as data entry and invoicing.
Alpyne Labs, which is bootstrapped and already generating revenue, is offering Juno on a flat monthly pricing model. A group of local “design partner” clinics has been shaping the product during its beta phase, and a public waitlist is now open.
