PsyOs.AI Wants to Turn Wyoming into a Mental-Health AI Hub

The original story by Dan Cepeda for Oil City News.

Computers have transformed medicine for decades, but they’ve mostly shied away from the messiest part of care: feelings. Charts, vitals, lab values — those are easy. Translating a patient’s tangled inner world into something a machine can understand, and then handing that insight back to clinicians in plain English? That’s where software has stumbled, says psychiatrist Dr. David Martorano.

“If you think about monitoring somebody’s pulse, that’s objective,” he says. “There’s a lot of subjective stuff to behavioral health, and analyzing that is a much higher-level intellectual process.”

He’s quick to add, with a grin:

“I’m not saying psychiatrists are smarter—it’s just a different process.”

Martorano, the chief medical officer at the Wyoming Behavioral Institute, is trying to bridge that gap with PsyOs.AI, a startup he co-founded with his wife, Anne. The idea is deceptively simple: build a system that can move fluently between database language and human language so mental-health providers get the right signal — right when they need it — while the machine quietly handles the heavy lifting in the background.

“We’re able to transform well back and forth,” he says. “Doctors see what’s important at the moment they’re treating patients, and computers correctly store and process the language. We’ve never really had that before.”

A big part of his critique is aimed at today’s “ambient scribing” tools, which passively turn conversations into notes after the fact. Helpful for paperwork, sure, but not exactly decision support.

“It didn’t help you make a better decision about how to help that person at that intersection; it wasn’t there at the moment,” Martorano says.

PsyOs.AI is built to be present tense—surfacing patterns, risk flags, and context during the interview—while still letting clinicians keep their eyes on the patient, not the keyboard.

“We want the AI to do a lot of the decoding and re-coding, but we don’t want to take people out of the process,” he says. “Give them a dashboard, let them focus on care, and stop wasting time on documentation.”

This isn’t just a tech play; it’s a place play. Martorano is adamant about planting the company firmly in Wyoming soil.

“I wanted this to be a Wyoming-grown project,” he says.

The mission: build a fully Wyoming-based tech outfit that tackles one of healthcare’s hardest problems — and then export the solution to the world. That home-field stance helped PsyOs.AI land as a finalist in the 2025 Casper Start-Up Challenge, a competition that’s quietly become a pipeline for ambitious founders across the state.

Pitch Night is set for Thursday, Oct. 30, at Frontier Brewing Company, where PsyOs.AI will make its case alongside the other finalists. Three winners will be named, but Martorano’s already seeing the upside: new relationships with investors, mentors, and partners who want to see a Wyoming company punch above its weight.

“It’s nice to see so many entrepreneurs coming out of Wyoming,” he says. “Because it’s a Wyoming-focused company, we hope to remain Wyoming-focused the whole time, but with a global reach.”

If PsyOs.AI hits its stride, mental-health visits could feel different: less clicking, more eye contact; less retroactive paperwork, more real-time insight. And if Martorano gets his way, the software making that possible won’t be coming from Silicon Valley. It’ll be built in the Cowboy State.