For investors and institutional partners · 2026-05-05

Clinical-grade conversational AI for mental health, built by people who needed it.

A UK-built mental health intelligence layer with a sourced 164-pattern safety stack, a lived-experience moat that cannot be cloned, and a regulatory pathway in motion.

Stage
Live, paid V1, NHS pipeline
Headquarters
Cardiff, UK · Companies House 16357419
Founder + Chairman
Tom Sanders + Kerl Haslam (Orange exit, 2005)
Conversation traffic
Public V1 demo serving live
The market

UK mental ill-health is a £51 billion problem with a productisation gap.

In 2024–2026 the UK NHS, employers and insurers spent over £51 billion combined on mental health and the cost of untreated mental ill-health, and the gap is growing. The supply side is constrained: clinical workforce shortages, waiting lists at record levels, fragmented governance over consumer-grade conversational AI, and a class of products that wrap LLMs without clinical safety architecture.

The opening is not "another wellbeing app". It is the clinical-grade conversational layer that NHS-aligned commissioners and regulated employers can actually deploy. That requires safety architecture, lived-experience design, governance and a regulatory pathway. The Threshold Collective is building exactly that.

£51bn
UK mental ill-health cost (Momentum Issue 01)
1 in 4
UK adults with a mental health condition each year
2-yr+
Adult NHS talking-therapy waits in some regions
700M
User cap under our base-model licence (room to scale)
What is live today

A four-layer safety stack with sourced patterns and sub-25ms crisis detection.

Elysium runs in production at elysium.thethresholdcollective.co.uk. The full safety architecture has been independently authored, version-controlled and is auditable on request.

164
Crisis-detection patterns active in production
NHS · Columbia C-SSRS · PHQ-9 · Beck · Joiner · Samaritans · Mind UK · CALM · RCPsych · Papyrus · WHO
100%
Crisis detection rate on an 83-prompt clinical battery
Pattern-level test, 2026-05-05 · zero misses, zero false positives
4-25ms
Crisis-disclosure detection latency before LLM is called
Deterministic regex layer, sub-LLM canned response
47
Output post-processor rules enforcing brand voice + safety deterministically
Validate-before-advise, no toxic positivity, British English
3
Independent layers above the LLM (input guardrails, output post-processor, session governance)
Defence in depth, not single point of safety
0
PII retained beyond the session
In-memory only, scrubbed of phone, NHS number, postcode, email

Full architecture, sources, and regulatory pathway: safety-architecture.html. Five real exchanges captured live this morning, with telemetry per layer: safety-demo.html.

The moat

Three things that competitors cannot copy by running Ollama with a system prompt.

01 · Lived experience

Both founders met inside the system Elysium is built for.

Tom Sanders: more than a year of his adult life behind psychiatric doors. Built and piloted the Band 5 lived-experience severe-psych service at Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. Kerl Haslam: former Head of Visionary Planning at Orange, architect of the world's first universal payment platform. Both severely unwell, both sectioned. The moat is not the code. The moat is the standing.

02 · Clinical pipeline

NHS, university, and ambulance-trust workstreams in motion.

SWAST clinical partnership pack delivered. Russell Group university partnership pack delivered. AACE ambulance trust workstream live. Premier League partner conversations active. Crystal Palace and Oxbridge clinical co-design partners on the reintegration arm.

03 · Governance-first design

The safety architecture is the product.

Surveillance refusal coded into the gateway. PII scrubbing on every request. Crisis detection firing before the LLM is called. Non-negotiable boundaries embedded in regex, not in prompts. This is the architecture that will pass an NHS information-governance review when others will not.

Roadmap

Where we are and what is next.

Today
Live V1. Public demo, paid £5/month The Room membership, four-layer safety stack, 164-pattern crisis-detection, NHS-language clinical safety.
Next 30 days
Elysium-1. First fine-tune on the TTC corpus (Phi-3.5-mini base, MIT licence). Distinctive weights, defensible IP, the model is genuinely ours.
Next 90 days
First commissioned NHS pilot. Convert one of the existing clinical partnership packs (SWAST or universities) into a paid pilot. Establish reference site + outcome telemetry.
Next 6 months
UKCA Class IIa pre-submission. When Elysium graduates from "wellbeing tool" to "structured intervention", we begin the regulatory pathway. The safety architecture is already at the bar this requires.
Next 12 months
Specialist model family. Elysium-Conversation, Elysium-Crisis-Tier, Elysium-Reflection. Routing layer picks the right one. This is the architecture defending £100m+ valuation conversations.
Six product arms · two adjacent service brands

The shape of The Threshold Collective.

Elysium is the most architecturally mature arm. The other five arms are at varying stages, each addressing a specific failure of the existing mental health system. Two adjacent service brands (engineering and quantitative research) sit alongside under the same governance.

Elysium
Conversational AI · live
Momentum
Publication · Issue 02 live
3-Expert Consultancy
By enquiry
VR Wellbeing
In development
The Annual
Pre-register
Reintegration
Phase-gated, Oxbridge co-design
The Tech Collective
Engineering services · live
The Quant Collective
Research, closed
The conversation we want

Investor, partner, or commissioner.

Three ways in.

Investor. Series A or strategic-led round to fund clinical pilot, fine-tune compute, and Elysium-1 → Elysium-2 progression. Use of proceeds is documented and conservative; we are not optimising for fundraise size, we are optimising for the right partner alongside Kerl on the cap table.

Institutional partner. NHS trust, university, ambulance service, insurer, employer. We have the strategic packs prepared and we are ready to convert one of them into a paid pilot. Reference site relationship is on offer.

Commissioner. If you commission mental health services and you have read this far, the conversation worth having is whether Elysium can sit upstream of NHS 111 option 2 as a pre-triage layer. Pack available.

Open the conversation

Replies usually within 24 hours from the founder directly. Full deck and supporting materials sent by request, with NDA on partner-grade documents.