INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
In recent months, we&ve seen more and more funding flowing into tools for mental wellness — whether that AI-driven tools to help patients
find help to meditation apps — and it seems like that trend is starting to pick up even more steam as smaller companies are grabbing the
attention of investors.There another one picking up funding today in Spring Health, a platform for smaller companies to help their employees
get more access to mental health treatment
The startup looks to give employers get access to a simple, effective way to start offering that treatment for their employees in the form
of personalized mental wellness plans
The employees get access to confidential plans in addition to access to a network and ways to get in touch with a therapist or psychiatrist
The company said it has raised an additional $6 million in funding led by Rethink Impact, with Work-Bench, BBG Ventures, and NYC Partnership
RRE Ventures and the William K
Warren Foundation also participated.&…I realized that mental health care is largely a guessing game: you use trial-and-error to find a
compatible therapist, and you use trial-and-error to find the right treatment regimen, whether that a specific cocktail of medications or a
specific type of psychotherapy,& CEO and co-founder April Koh said
&Everything around us is personalized these days & like shopping on Amazon, search results on Google, and restaurant recommendations on Yelp
& but you can&t get personalized recommendations for your mental health care
I wanted to build a platform that connects you with the right care for you from the very beginning
So I partnered with leading expert on personalized psychiatry, Dr
Adam Chekroud our Chief Scientist, and my friend Abhishek Chandra, our CTO, to start Spring Health.&The startup bills itself as an online
mental health clinic that offers recommendations for employees, such as treatment options or tweaks to their daily routines (like exercise
Like other machine learning-driven platforms, Spring Health puts a questionnaire in front of the end employee that adapts to the responses
they are giving and then generates a wellness plan for that specific individual
As more and more patients get on the service, it gets more data, and can improve those recommendations over time
Those patients are then matched with clinicians and licensed medical health professionals from the company network.&We found that employers
were asking for it,& Koh said
&As a company we started off by selling an AI-enabled clinical decision support tool to health systems to empower their doctors to make
While selling that tool to one big health system, word reached their benefits department, and they reached out to us and told us they need
something in benefits to deal with mental health needs of their employee base
When that happened, we decided to completely focus on selling a &full-stack& mental health solution to employers for their employees
Instead of selling a tool to doctors, we decided we would create our own network of best-in-class mental health providers who would use our
tools to deliver the best mental health care possible.&However, Spring Health isn&t the only startup looking to create an intelligent
matching system for employees seeking mental health
Lyra Health, another tool to help employees securely and confidentially begin the process of getting mental health treatment, raised $45
But Spring Health and Lyra Health are both part of a wave of startups looking to create ways for employees to more efficiently seek care
powered by machine learning and capitalizing on the cost and difficulty of those tools dropping dramatically.And it not the only service in
the mental wellness category also picking up traction, with meditation app Calm raising $27 million at a $250 million valuation
Employers naturally have a stake in the health of their employees, and as all these apps look to make getting mental health treatment or
improving mental wellness easier — and less of a taboo — the hope is they&ll continue to lower the barrier to entry, both from the
actual product inertia and getting people comfortable with seeking help in the first place.&I think VC are realizing there a huge
opportunity to disrupt mental health care and make it accessible, convenient and affordable
But from our perspective, the problem with the space is that there is a lot of unvetted, non-evidence-based technology
There a ton of vaporware surrounding AI, big data, and machine-learning, especially in mental health care
We want to set a higher standard in mental healthcare that is based on evidence and clinical validation
Unlike most mental health care solutions on the market, we have multiple peer-reviewed publications in top medical journals like JAMA,
describing and substantiating our technology
We know that our personalized recommendations and our Care Navigation approach are evidence-based and proven to work.
