therapy
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With $3M seed, Frame streamlines finding a therapist and builds a one-stop shop for private practices
Therapy is rapidly becoming a standard part of many people’s lives, but 2020 interrupted that trend by nixing in-person sessions and forcing therapists to migrate their entire practice online — and it turns out that’s not so easy. Frame simplifies it with an all-in-one portal for clients and therapists, unifying the listings, tools and management software that run the countless small businesses making up the industry.
Kendall Bird and Sage Grazer are old friends who happened to be in the right place at the right time — a strange thing to say about anyone anywhere at the start of 2020, but it’s true. The startup’s pitch of bringing your practice entirely online and offering all-online sessions, bookkeeping, scheduling and everything turned out to be exactly what would soon be needed — though as they tell it, it has actually been needed for some time.
Grazer, a therapist herself, experienced firsthand the unexpected difficulties of getting up and running.
“When I started my practice in 2016, I was really passionate about the clinical work, but I was very overwhelmed by setting up a business, marketing, financial stuff,” she said. “So we wanted to help other therapists through that.”
She and Bird happened to reconnect around that time and the two saw an opportunity to improve things.
Kendall Bird (left) and Sage Grazer. Image Credits: Frame
“We think about therapists as being a one-on-one thing, but they’re really a small business,” said Bird, who formerly worked in marketing at Snapchat, Google and YouTube. “They’re underserved and undersupported as mental health professionals — they don’t have the back-office support that doctors do, and they’re not trained how to run businesses. It just made sense to build a scalable SaaS solution that lets these people work for themselves.”
The therapy industry, like other medical institutions, has two sides: client-facing and practitioner-facing. While there are a handful of services online that combine these, many essentially recruit therapists as contractors. If you want to run your own practice, you’ll likely be using a combination of specialty scheduling, telehealth, billing and other tools made with medical privacy considerations in mind.
“The therapy tools and services landscape is incredibly fragmented — the average therapist is using 5-7 tools, and most of those are not built for therapy,” said Bird.
And then of course there’s Psychology Today: a periodical that straddles the roles of pop psych and industry rag, but whose chief reason for existing for many is its voluminous therapist listings, which dominate search and provide an overwhelming first stop for anyone looking to find one in their area. But for such a personal and consequential decision these brief listings don’t give wary potential clients the impression they’re making an informed choice.
“We wanted an experience that was more approachable, uses language that doesn’t feel overwhelming or pathologizing,” said Grazer. “There are people going to therapy feeling alone and confused, who don’t identify with a disorder or checking a check box.”
Image Credits: Frame
Frame eschews the oversimplified “scroll through therapists near your area code” with a short quiz — not a diagnosis or personality test but just a few basic questions — that winnows down your choices to a handful of local and appropriate therapists, with whom you can instantly set up free introductory video calls. If you find someone you like, the rest of the professional relationship takes place on Frame, though of course soon in-person sessions may return.
For those not quite ready to take the plunge, the company organizes livestreamed sessions between volunteers and therapists to show what a full hour of work might look like. (Whatever courage it may take to confront one’s issues in therapy, it surely takes even more to do so with an audience.)
On the therapist’s side, Frame is meant to be a one-stop shop. Marketing and telehealth sessions are on there, as noted above, but so are things like scheduling, notes, billing, notifications, and so on, all tailored specifically to the needs of the industry. And while the shift to online services has been a long time coming, the company just happened to drop in just as the need went into overdrive.
Image Credits: Frame
“We built it before COVID ever existed — launched in March 2020 and had telehealth as an option, thinking ‘oh, well maybe some people will do this.’ The majority of therapists in America weren’t doing sessions online at the time… but after COVID they all are,” Bird said. “And they’re looking for these tools now because they’re seeing the rewards of running a lot of their business through telehealth.”
Many therapists are finding that after resisting the transition for years, they are encountering all kinds of benefits, explained Grazer. Like other industries, the flexibility inherent to shifting in-person meetings to virtual ones has been freeing and in some cases profitable. The change is here to stay.
The site is in a closed beta limited to a part of California at present, since therapists are limited to operating in-state and there are other regulations to consider, not to mention all the usual struggles of putting together a sprawling professional service. But the $3 million funding round, led by Maven Ventures, will help fill out the product and move the company toward a larger audience. Sugar Capital, Struck Capital, Alpha Edison and January Ventures participated in the raise.
The money is “almost exclusively going to engineering.” The goal is to open up the beta, expand to the rest of California, then move out to other states once they have the infrastructure to do so and have responded to feedback from the initial rollout.
“Sage and I are really aligned in the belief that the best way to make therapy more accessible to America is to support therapists,” said Bird.
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Headway raises $70M at a $750M valuation to help connect therapists with people and insurance schemes
Mental health, and how it is getting addressed, has been one of the major leitmotifs of the past year of pandemic living. COVID-19 not only has led to a lot of people getting ill or worse; it has increased isolation, economic uncertainty and led to a lot of other kinds of disappointments, and that all has had a knock-on effect on our collective and individual state of mind.
Today a startup called Headway, which has been working on building a better way for people to attend to themselves — by way of a three-sided marketplace of sorts, by helping a person to find and afford a therapist via a free-to-use portal, by making it possible for those therapists to accept a wider range of insurance plans and by helping those insurance plans facilitate more therapy appointments for their patient networks — is announcing a major round of funding on the heels of strong growth.
The startup has raised $70 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its platform with more partnerships, more hiring for its team (it wants to have 300 people this year) and opening in new regions, aiming to be nationwide this year in the U.S. This round, a Series B, has a number of big names attached to it: It is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Thrive, GV and Accel also participating. (The latter three are repeat investors: Thrive and GV led its Series A, while Accel led its seed.) This Series B is coming in at a $750 million valuation.
The rapid pace of funding, the backers and that valuation all underscore the timeliness of the concept, and also the traction that Headway is getting for its approach.
When we last covered Headway — it raised $26 million just last November, six months ago — it said it had registered some 1,800 therapists on its platform in the New York metro area, where it is based. Now that number is up to more than 3,000 with its network now covering not just NYC, but also New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Michigan, Virginia, Washington, Illinois and Colorado. It has more than 2,000 patients joining the platform each month and has so far helped facilitate 300,000 appointments, with a current average of 30,000 appointments each month. Revenues have in the last year, meanwhile, grown nine-fold.
The approach that Headway is taking — creating not just a vertical search portal for therapists, but building a back-end system to help those therapists grow their business by making it easier for them to accept insurance coverage — comes directly out of the experiences faced by one of the startup’s co-founders.
Andrew Adams, the CEO of Headway, told me last year he came up with the idea after he moved to New York from California several years ago to take a job. In seeking a therapist, he found most unwilling to accept his insurance plan as payment, making getting therapy unaffordable.
This is a very typical problem, he said. Some 70% of therapists do not accept insurance today because it’s too complicated for them to integrate, since about 85% of all therapists happen to be solo practitioners. So something that should be accessible to everyone becomes something typically only used by those who can afford it, or have entered into social care programs that might provide it. But that leaves a massive gap in the middle.
“This is the defining problem in the space,” he said at the time. “Health insurance is built around a medical world dominated by billers and admins, but therapists are small practitioners and don’t have the bandwidth to handle that, so they don’t. So we thought if we could make it easier for them to, they would, and they have.”
And indeed, if you are needing to see a therapist, the very last thing you need or want to be doing is spending your time trying to work out the economics of doing so: You need to be focused on finding someone you feel you can talk to; someone who can help you.
The problem is a huge one. In the U.S. alone it’s estimated that there are some 82 million people who have treatable health conditions. Headway was founded on the premise that most of them currently do not seek that treatment because of cost or accessibility.
A lot of therapy has traditionally been about seeing people in person — and arguably the fact that we’ve had so much reduced contact with people has contributed to mental health issues this past year — but in the event, Headway has definitely adapted to the current climate.
The company says that some 89% of its appointments at the moment are being carried out remotely. This is down from 97% at the peak of the pandemic in the U.S., and has been slowly starting to taper off, the company said. Some of the increased volume, meanwhile, is a direct result of therapists working remotely — they can fit more people in to a daily schedule as a result.
In terms of insurers, the company currently works with Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare, Oscar and Oxford and says the list will be growing. One interesting detail is that Headway has not only built out a bigger funnel for these insurers in terms of the practitioners they work with and individuals who can subsequently use insurance to pay for therapy, but conversely has served to be a conduit for those insurance groups in bringing more patients through to those therapists, who are now a part of their networks, by way of Headway’s platform.
Headway says that using its system can help a patient get an appointment within five days, versus the the 30-day average you typically face when using an insurance directory.
It’s the kind of scale and “software eating the world” efficiency that has attracted Andreessen Horowitz to backing companies before, with the added detail of this being particularly relevant to the time we are living in.
“By getting the mental health provider community on the same page with insurance companies for the first time, Headway unlocks affordable mental healthcare for millions of Americans,” said Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We’re incredibly excited to work alongside the Headway team.” Kupor is also joining Headway’s board with this round.
Cherry Miao, a former partner at Accel and Headway’s lead seed investor, is also joining as head of Finance & Data.
“I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the world’s most influential startups, and know that being part of Headway’s meaningful mission, robust business model, and incredibly talented team is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she said. “I’m thrilled to be helping rebuild America’s mental healthcare system for access and affordability.”
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Torch takes $10M to teach empathy to executives
When everyone always tells you “yes,” you can become a monster. Leaders especially need honest feedback to grow. “If you look at rich people like Donald Trump and you neglect them, you get more Donald Trumps,” says Torch co-founder and CEO Cameron Yarbrough about our gruff president. His app wants to make executive coaching (a polite word for therapy) part of even the busiest executive’s schedule. Torch conducts a 360-degree interview with a client and their employees to assess weaknesses, lays out improvement goals and provides one-on-one video chat sessions with trained counselors.
“Essentially we’re trying to help that person develop the capacity to be a more loving human being in the workplace,” Yarbrough explains. That’s crucial in the age of “hustle porn,” where everyone tries to pretend they’re working all the time and constantly “crushing it.” That can leave leaders facing challenges feeling alone and unworthy. Torch wants to provide a private place to reach out for a helping hand or shoulder to cry on.
Now Torch is ready to lead the way to better management for more companies, as it’s just raised a $10 million Series A round led by Norwest Venture Partners, along with Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and West Ventures. It already has 100 clients, including Reddit and Atrium, but the new cash will fuel its go-to market strategy. Rather than trying to democratize access to coaching, Torch is doubling-down on teaching founders, C-suites and other senior executives how to care… or not care too much.
“I came out of a tough family myself and I had to do a ton of therapy and a ton of meditation to emerge and be an effective leader myself,” Yarbrough recalls. “Philosophically, I care about personal growth. It’s just true all the way down to birth for me. What I’m selling is authentic to who I am.”
Torch’s co-founders met when they were in grad school for counseling psychology degrees, practicing group therapy sessions together. Yarbrough went on to practice clinically and start Well Clinic in the Bay Area, while Keegan Walden got his PhD. Yarbrough worked with married couples to resolve troubles, and “the next thing I know I was working with high-profile startup founders, who like anybody have their fair share of conflicts.”
Torch co-founders (from left): Cameron Yarbrough and Keegan Walden
Coaching romantic partners to be upfront about expectations and kind during arguments translated seamlessly to keep co-founders from buckling under stress. As Yarbrough explains, “I was noticing that they were consistently having problems with five different things:
1. Communication – Surfacing problems early with kindness
2. Healthy workplace boundaries – Making sure people don’t step on each others’ toes
3. How to manage conflict in a healthy way – Staying calm and avoiding finger-pointing
4. How to be positively influential – Being motivational without being annoying or pushy
5. How to manage one’s ego, whether that’s insecurity or narcissism – Seeing the team’s win as the first priority
To address those, companies hire Torch to coach one or more of their executives. Torch conducts extensive 360-degree interviews with the exec, as well as their reports, employees and peers. It seeks to score them on empathy, visionary thinking, communication, conflict, management and collaboration, Torch then structures goals and improvement timelines that it tracks with follow-up interviews with the team and quantifiable metrics that can all be tracked by HR through a software dashboard.
To make progress on these fronts, execs do video chat sessions through Torch’s app with coaches trained in these skills. “These are all working people with by nature very tight schedules. They don’t have time to come in for a live session so we come to them in the form of video,” Yarbrough tells me. Rates vary from $500 per month to $1,500 per month for a senior coach in the U.S., Europe, APAC or EMEA, with Torch scoring a significant margin. “We’re B2B only. We’re not focused on being the most affordable solution. We’re focused on being the most effective. And we find that there’s less price sensitivity for senior leaders where the cost of their underperformance is incredibly high to the organization.” Torch’s top source of churn is clients’ going out of business, not ceasing to want its services.
Here are two examples of how big-wigs get better with Torch. “Let’s say we have a client who really just wants to be liked all the time, so much so that they have a hard time getting things done. The feedback from the 360 would come back like ‘I find that Cameron is continually telling me what I want to hear but I don’t know what the expectations are of me and I need him to be more direct,’ ” Yarbrough explains. “The problem is those leaders will eventually fire those people who are failing, but they’ll say they had no idea they weren’t performing because he never told them.” Torch’s coaches can teach them to practice tough-love when necessary and to be more transparent. Meanwhile, a boss who storms around the office and “is super-direct and unkind” could be instructed on how to “develop more empathic attunement.”
Yarbrough specifically designed Torch’s software to not be too prescriptive and leave room for the relationship between the coach and client to unfold. And for privacy, coaches don’t record notes and HR only sees the performance goals and progress, not the content of the video chats. It wants execs to feel comfortable getting real without the worry their personal or trade secrets could leak. “And if someone is bringing in something about trauma or that’s super-sensitive about their personal life, their coach will refer them out to psychotherapists,” Yarbrough assures me.
Torch’s direct competition comes from boutique executive coaching firms around the world, while on the tech side, BetterUp is trying to make coaching scale to every type of employee. But its biggest foe is the stubborn status quo of stiff-upper-lipping it.
The startup world has been plagued by too many tragic suicides, deep depression and paralyzing burnout. It’s easy for founders to judge their own worth not by self-confidence or even the absolute value of their accomplishments, but by their status relative to yesterday. That means one blown deal, employee quitting or product delay can make an executive feel awful. But if they turn to their peers or investors, it could hurt their partnership and fundraising prospects. To keep putting in the work, they need an emotional outlet.
“We ultimately have to create this great software that super-powers human beings. People are not robots yet. They will be someday, but not yet,” Yarbrough concludes with a laugh. IQ alone doesn’t make people succeed. Torch can help them develop the EQ, or emotional intelligence quotient, they need to become a boss that’s looked up to.
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Meru Health wants to make mental health care more accessible
Getting mental health services can be burdensome. And if you’re already going through a tough time, you’re probably looking for help sooner than later. But based on the current landscape, it can take months to find the right therapist who also takes your insurance.
This is where Meru Health hopes to come in. By providing its service as a benefit for employers to offer to their employees, Meru Health can operate as a first line of treatment where people can get help in a matter of weeks, Meru Health co-founder and CEO Kristian Ranta told TechCrunch.
Ranta, who lost his brother to suicide a few years ago, said there are “unfortunately lots of people suffering from depression and who are vulnerable to burnout.”
It’s true. Worldwide, more than 300 million people suffer from depression and 260 million suffer from anxiety disorders, according to the World Health Organization.
Meru Health offers an eight-week treatment program for depression, burnout and anxiety. The program, currently led by five licensed therapists, utilizes both cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral activation and mindfulness-based intervention. Provided as an employee benefit, Meru Health only charges companies if the patients report feeling any better.
Meru Health’s current customers include WeWork and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. To date, Meru Health says 75 percent of the people who go through its program report symptom reduction.
Other startups working in the mental health space include Pacifica and Lantern, a mental health startup that offers tools to deal with stress, anxiety and body image. To date, Lantern has raised more than $20 million in funding. Another one is Talkspace, which aims to be an alternative to traditional therapy.
Down the road, Meru Health may make its service available to everyday consumers, but right now, Ranta said the focus is on selling to larger employers and doing clinical research. Meru Health is also looking to bring on board a doctor to help with medication management and, possibly, even providing prescriptions, Ranta said. Meru Health, which is currently participating in Y Combinator, envisions bringing on a medical doctor post-YC.
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