Amae Health is building a face-to-face approach to mental health care in an increasingly digital space | TechCrunch

When Sonia Garca and Stas Sokolin decided to launch Amae Health to solve the broken care system for people with severe mental illness, they were already intimately familiar with the industry’s problems.

“I started thinking about this problem a long time ago,” said Amae CEO Sokolin. “I grew up with a sister who had bipolar disorder for many, many years, and as a family we always struggled to find treatment for her. It seemed like everything was so fragmented and it tore our family apart.”

Garcia also had her own experiences with the mental health system. She lost her father to suicide when she was 16, and then she and her family spent years as caregivers for her brother with schizoaffective and bipolar disorder. Sokolin and Garca were introduced to Stanford by mutual friends because they were both passionate about this area. The couple knew the system could be better.

They launched Amae Health in 2022 to be a new approach to helping patients with serious mental illnesses. Amae brings resources including family and individual therapy, social workers, psychiatric care and medication management under one roof. A physical ceiling, that is, as Amae focuses on an in-person approach. The startup hired Dr. Scott Fears, who had experience with this global care approach through his work with the Veterans Affair Hospital in Los Angeles, so they could iterate and improve an existing model rather than start a new one from scratch.

Amae Health just raised a $15 million Series A round led by Quiet Capital with participation from Healthier Capital, the firm of former One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin; The Baszucki Group and Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi, plus all of the company’s then-investors. The startup currently has a clinic in Los Angeles and plans to use the capital to expand. Its next hub will be in Raleigh, North Carolina, with locations in Houston, Ohio and New York soon to follow.

The funds will also be used to continue building the company’s data platform. Sokolin said the company is using AI to review the data it collects at its clinic to find ways to continue to improve care.

Over the past few years, many startups have been launched to improve the mental health system, but Amae Health’s area of ​​focus and approach stand out. Most of the mental health startups that launched during the pandemic are digital first and focus on anxiety and depression. Amae looks very different.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with having a list of companies focused on anxiety and depression, and it’s good to see founders focused on helping people with serious mental illnesses as well. Serious mental health problems affect 14.1 million people in the United States, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But there is much less innovation in the sector.

This isn’t too surprising: solutions for people with serious mental illness don’t fit neatly into a traditional business model like many digital and telemedicine solutions do. People with serious mental illnesses require personalized care, which makes solutions more expensive and slower to scale.

“When we first went out to raise money, a lot of venture capitalists were like, why are you doing this in person? Why isn’t this virtual?” Sokolin said. “The fact is, you can’t virtually treat someone who has delusions or auditory hallucinations. Just like you can’t virtually treat cancer, you can’t virtually treat this.”

The nature of the business also means they aren’t expanding to all 50 states right away, as some digital health startups have been able to do. Garcia said the company is fine with that because it’s more focused on results than scale.

“It’s about intentional growth and scale, not about the market taking everything, but about being really considerate and aware of how we grow and making sure we’re creating lasting change and recovery in these people’s lives ” Garcia said.

Trying to scale too fast has hurt some mental health startups. The Brain Therapy telemedicine platform has come under fire for the way it advertises to potential customers and how it handles patient data in its quest for scale.

This slower-growth approach can and has worked before, said Sokolin, a former VC at both the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Health2047. One Medical, a full-service health care system including face-to-face care, is a good example. The company raised more than $500 million before being snapped up by Amazon for $3.9 billion. It’s no surprise that the former CEO is a current Amae investor.

Sokolin and Garca are fine with the fact that their approach has turned off some potential investors. They are more focused on building a quality care system, not just how many patients they can see.

“There are a lot more people than anyone could treat,” Sokolin said of the reach of people with serious mental illness. “We’ll never deal with anything more than a small fraction, but we want to be the best-in-class provider for these members.”