Most complex diseases are treated with precise numbers. Yet in mental health, the core inputs are conversations, checklists, and memory. As depression, anxiety, and PTSD place more pressure on clinics, this thin measurement layer limits how far care systems can scale and adapt. Turning precision psychiatry from slogan into practice hinges on building objective measurement and data infrastructure. And creating that infrastructure requires structural funding programs and institutions willing to support teams doing the work.

ARPA-H sits inside that space. The agency is often described as a DARPA for health, set up to run time-boxed, high-risk, high-reward biomedical programs outside traditional NIH grant structures. On 21 November 2025 it announced EVIDENT, a behavioral health initiative that commits up to 100 million dollars to develop quantitative measures of mental and behavioral health and to test how people respond to rapid or novel treatments. With EVIDENT, ARPA-H bets on measurement, data infrastructure, and hard neurotech as the levers most likely to move the field.

Inside ARPHA-H 100m Commitment

On 21 November 2025, ARPA-H announced EVIDENT, an initiative that will invest up to 100 million dollars in clinical trials of rapid-acting mental-health interventions and in the measurement systems that accompany them. The program is built around two pillars: collecting rich, consistent data on clinical outcomes, and capturing how individuals respond to fast-acting treatments across hours, days, and weeks. Director Alicia Jackson described the goal as breaking through long-standing barriers in measurement, diagnosis, and treatment by grounding trials in more objective evidence.

EVIDENT sits within the standard ARPA-H formula: an initiative with several tracks rather than a single grant you apply for and wait on. These programs are built to move from concept to contract quickly and to let different technical approaches run in parallel under one structure. For the EVIDENT initiative, teams will be asked to run clinical studies, produce multimodal datasets over time, and deliver anonymized data and samples into a shared repository. Funding unlocks when these milestones are met.

Within that structure, the initiative highlights several categories of technology. ARPA-H documents and external coverage point to neuromodulation, digital therapeutics, and rapid-acting pharmacology, including psychedelics and other neuroplastogens, as examples of interventions capable of producing measurable change on short timescales. The goal is to link these treatments to regulatory-ready endpoints that can show who benefits, under what conditions, and on what timeline.

Analysts have noted that EVIDENT is the first major mental-health initiative under new ARPA-H director Alicia Jackson and is being presented as a flagship move into behavioral health. Citeline frames the 100 million dollar program as a way to build the evidence base for fast-acting treatments such as neuromodulation and digital tools, placing it alongside earlier ARPA-H work in oncology, biomanufacturing, and brain repair programs like CATALYST and FRONT.

How ARPA-H Can Boost Neurotech

EVIDENT sets a clear direction for the type of evidence ARPA-H wants to build. The agency emphasises multimodal, longitudinal datasets collected inside clinical trials. These datasets are expected to connect standard clinical scales with behavioral, physiological, and in some cases neural or cognitive measures gathered before, during, and after treatment. That includes symptom scores, suicidality measures, relapse events, sleep and activity patterns, wearable-derived metrics, and task-based readouts.

On the intervention side, EVIDENT highlights neuromodulation, fast-acting drugs, and structured digital therapeutics as the main areas of interest. These approaches can generate measurable changes within hours or days, making them suitable for trial designs anchored in continuous or near-continuous measurement. This places a broad range of neurotech inside the frame: TMS and related stimulation methods, emerging closed-loop or adaptive stimulation protocols, and VR or software-based behavioral programs with trackable structures. Teletherapy and wellness apps sit outside this framing, as they offer fewer measurable signals for trial pipelines.

For neurotech founders, the main opportunities sit in measurement, sensing, biosignal integration, and trial execution. Companies working on EEG, fNIRS, HRV systems, sleep or activity monitors, wearable-based cognitive assessments, or closed-loop stimulation hardware can align their products with the data requirements ARPA-H sets. Analytics platforms that synchronise streams, clean data, or generate validated metrics also qualify, as do trial-data infrastructures that support real-time monitoring. Whereas academic groups with specific measurement techniques can decide to contribute to larger consortia.