When Sonia García and Staś Sokolin decided to launch Amae Health to address a broken system of care for people with serious mental illness, they were already intimately familiar with the industry’s problems.
“I started thinking about this problem a very long time ago,” said Sokolin, Amae’s CEO. “I grew up with a sister who suffered from bipolar disorder for many, many years, and as a family we always had trouble finding her care. Everything seemed fragmented and it tore our family apart.”
Garcia also had her own experiences with the mental health care system. She lost her father to suicide at the age of 16, and then, together with her family, she spent years caring for her brother who suffered from schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder. Sokolin and García were introduced by mutual friends at Stanford University because they were each passionate about the field. They each knew the system may very well be higher.
In 2022, they launched Amae Health to provide a recent approach to helping patients with serious mental illness. Amae brings resources – including family and individual therapy, social staff, mental health care and medication management – all under one roof. That means one physical roof, as Amae focuses on a personal approach. The startup hired Dr. Scott Fears, who had experience with this comprehensive approach to care from his work at Veterans Affair Hospital in Los Angeles, so it could proceed and refine the existing model quite than starting a recent one from scratch.
Amae Health just raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Quiet Capital with participation from Healthier Capital, the company of former One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin; Baszucki Group and Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi, in addition to all of the company’s seed investors. The startup currently has one clinic in Los Angeles and plans to use the capital for expansion. The next center will likely be in Raleigh, North Carolina, followed soon by Houston, Ohio and New York.
The funds may also be used to further expand the company’s data platform. Sokolin said the company uses artificial intelligence to sift through data sets collected at the clinic to find ways to further improve care.
Over the past few years, many startups have launched to improve the mental health care system, but Amae Health’s focus and approach stand out. Most of the mental health startups that have sprung up during the pandemic have been digital startups focusing on anxiety and depression. Amae looks completely different.
Of course, there’s nothing improper with having a pipeline of firms focused on treating anxiety and depression, and it’s good to see founders also focusing on helping people with serious mental illness. Serious mental health problems affects 14.1 million people in the US– reports the National Association on Mental Illness. However, there is much less innovation in this sector.
This is not too surprising: solutions for people with serious mental illness do not fit neatly into the traditional enterprise model, unlike many telemedicine and digital solutions. People with serious mental illness require personal care, which makes solutions more costly and slower to implement.
“When we first went out to raise money, a lot of venture capitalists asked, why are you doing this personally? Why isn’t it virtual?” – said Sokolin. “The fact is that you cannot virtually treat a person who has delusions or auditory hallucinations. Just like you can’t treat cancer virtually, you can’t treat this virtually.”
The nature of the company also means it doesn’t expand to all 50 states at once, as some digital health startups have been able to do. García said this does not trouble the company because it is more focused on results than scaling.
“It’s about intentional growth and scale, not a winner-take-all marketplace, but about real consideration and awareness of how we’re growing and ensuring that we’re generating lasting change and revitalization in the lives of these people,” Garcia said .
Trying to scale too quickly has hurt some mental health startups. Therapeutic telemedicine platform Cerebral has come under fire for the way it advertises to potential customers and handles patient data in a bid to achieve economies of scale.
This slower-growth approach could work well for ventures earlier, said Sokolin, a former VC at each the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Health2047. An ideal example is One Medical, a health care system offering a full range of services, including personal care. The company raised greater than $500 million before being acquired by Amazon for $3.9 billion. It’s no surprise that the former CEO is a current investor in Amae.
Sokolin and García don’t mind the proven fact that their approach has discouraged some potential investors. They focus more on building a system of high-quality care, not only on the variety of patients they’ll admit.
“There are far more people than anyone could ever treat,” Sokolin said of the number of individuals suffering from serious mental illness. “We will never treat anything more than a small fraction, but we want to be a best-in-class provider for these members.”