Ariela Safira was a student at Stanford University when a friend tried to take her own life. It was 2013 and a friend’s visit to the center made Safira feel scared. “I experienced mental health care for the first time in my life,” she says, recalling hearing some of the other patients screaming. “The system didn’t make sense to me. What’s more, I was terrified of him. How was she supposed to recover here?”
Her friend wasn’t alone. During the first half of Safira’s yr at Stanford University, 44 students from the highschool across the street were hospitalized for suicidal thoughts.
“My perception then is what it is now: We should all stop what we are doing and scream at the thought that people are struggling so much that they don’t want to live,” he says.
Safira worked with design and consulting firm Ideo on learn how to design mental health care, and then with CityBlock, which spun off from Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, to design mental health care for the Medicare population. She also trained in the clinical psychology program at Columbia University.
“I gave up when I thought I had seen it all and that it wouldn’t solve our mental crisis for a million reasons,” she says. “My point ultimately came down to the fact that individual therapy cannot be used to address this crisis.”
This experience led Safira to open a brick-and-mortar therapy company called Real in 2019, which offered individual and group therapy. However, in June 2024, Safira modified Real’s position Zeeramental health care company offering audio-only content.
She founded Zeera to mix the sort of anonymously accessible group therapy people were turning to during the pandemic with a therapist’s tools and lessons, stories from real people, and podcast-style technology. Users can hearken to two-minute sessions or hours-long content collections, and the algorithm makes suggestions based on the user’s selections. In the first yr, 100,000 people joined the app, providing the same clinical results as individual therapy using audio-only content. All this made Safira a finalist in our list of 20 modern leaders Entrepreneur 2024.
So you began this company in 2019, but between then and June 2023 you modified the name to Zeera and the business took off. What happened?
We began as a residential model called Real, where you pay for a monthly membership and can receive individual or group therapy. Then Covid hit and we learned things we never expected. They all wanted group therapy, but with the video turned off and their names hidden. When we surveyed people, they said they wanted to listen to how others dealt with a problem and wanted a therapist to inform them what to do about the problem, but they didn’t want people to know they were in a difficult situation. group.
And people asked for recordings. We didn’t advertise it, but people said they wanted the records because every thing was tremendous on Thursday at 4 p.m., when this group was happening, but they needed them at midnight on Saturday when they’d something to do.
Here are some necessary observations about what people really need from therapy.
This was a phenomenal commentary. The query was whether creating an app with only audio content could possibly be clinically effective and provide results just like individual therapy. We brought in experts from Spotify and Netflix and paired them with clinicians to develop this model.
So the way Zeera works is based on an algorithm?
Yes. On the other hand, we track what each person does in the app and then personalize the experience, identical to Instagram or Netflix do. These platforms can predict what you wish or want higher than you’ll be able to.
You might say, “Ariela is at a moderate level of body dysmorphia, but at a severe level of relationship anxiety.” We can discover this based on the content you engage with and can recommend sessions that can move Ariela from her current state of mental health to a healthier state.
Can people register from anywhere?
Yes, but we also began selling Zeera as a health profit for employees. This completely modified our company’s business model. Statistically speaking, 72% of working adults today have symptoms of mental illness, and yet lower than 3% of employees even use mental health services. CEOs knew this was a problem. Our first partner was a Big Four accounting firm.
How did this influence the development of your company?
In our first yr, 100,000 people used the app. We exceeded previous engagement rates for corporate mental health services by 14 times, and 100% of our customers renewed their contracts.
What made you suspect there needs to be a recent strategy to deliver mental health services?
Can you imagine someone first meeting a physical therapy doctor in their 50s? We would consider this absurd. But that is the way it is with mental health care. Research shows that individuals wait an average of 11 years for care. Most spend their entire lives suffering in silence. The system is damaged. We must think this through.