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Sonia Garcia and Stas Sokolin were already familiar with the industry’s problems when they decided to start Amae Health to solve a broken care system for people with severe mental illness.
“I started thinking about this problem a long time ago,” said Amae CEO Sokolin. “I grew up with her sister who has been suffering from bipolar disorder for many years and we always struggled to find care for her as a family. I tore it apart.”
Garcia also has her own experience with the mental health system. She lost her father to suicide when she was 16 years old, and then she and her family spent years as caregivers for her older brother, who has schizoaffective and bipolar disorder. Sokolin and Garcia were introduced by mutual friends from Stanford University. Because we both had a passion for this field. They both knew the system could be better.
They launched Amae Health in 2022 as a new approach to supporting patients with severe mental illness. Amae provides resources for family and individual therapy, social workers, psychiatric care, medication management, and more all under one roof. This means that Amae focuses on an in-person approach, so we have one physical roof over our heads. The startup hired Dr. Scott Fears, who gained experience in this holistic care his approach through his work at the Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Hospital. This allows you to iterate and improve existing models rather than starting a new model 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 will be joined by all of the company’s seed investors. The startup currently operates one of his clinics in Los Angeles and plans to use the capital for expansion. The next center will open in Raleigh, North Carolina, followed shortly by locations in Houston, Ohio, and New York.
The funding will also be used to continue building out the company’s data platform. Sokolin said the company uses AI to examine the large amounts of data it collects in clinics to find ways to continue to improve care.
While many startups have been launched in recent years to improve the mental health care system, Amae Health’s focus and approach stand out. Most mental health startups launched during the pandemic are digital-first and focused on anxiety and depression. Amae seems to be quite different.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having so many companies focused on anxiety and depression, and it’s good to see founders also focusing on helping people with severe mental illness. That’s it.severe mental health problems Affects 14.1 million people in the United States, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. However, there is much less innovation in this area.
That’s not that surprising. Solutions for people with severe mental illness, like many telehealth and digital solutions, don’t fit perfectly into traditional venture models. People with severe mental illness require in-person care, making solutions more expensive and slower to scale.
“When we first went out to raise money, a lot of venture investors asked us why we were doing this in person. Why isn’t this virtual?” Sokolin said. “The reality is that you can’t treat someone with delusions or auditory hallucinations virtually. Just like you can’t treat cancer virtually, you can’t treat this virtually.”
The nature of the business also means it can’t immediately expand to all 50 states like some digital health startups. Garcia said this is fine because the company is focused on results rather than scale.
“It’s about intentional growth and scale, not a winner-take-all market, but being really considerate and conscious about how we grow and making lasting changes and changes in the lives of these individuals. It’s about making sure we create recovery,” Garcia said.
Trying to expand too quickly is hurting some mental health startups. Telemedicine treatment platform Cerebral has come under fire for how it advertises to potential customers and how it handles patient data in its quest for scale.
Sokolin, a former venture capitalist with both the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Health 2047, said this kind of gradual growth approach is possible in venture companies and has worked before. One Medical, a full-service health system that includes in-person care, is a prime example. The company raised more than $500 million and was later acquired by Amazon for $3.9 billion. It’s no surprise that the former CEO is a current investor in Amae.
Mr. Sokolin and Mr. Garcia are fine with the fact that their approach has turned off some potential investors. They are focused on building systems for quality care, not on how many patients they can see.
“There are so many people that no one can treat,” Sokolin said of the range of people with severe mental illness. “We never intend to serve more than just a few, but we want to be a best-in-class provider for those members.”
