David Mou teams up with Tom Insel to launch mental health startup

After taking the helm of the controversial virtual mental health company, David Moo is ready to move on and try again. He’s working with Thomas Insel to form a new venture that hopes to address what founders see as a distorted incentive that sent many mental health companies down the wrong path.

Mou and Insel are both psychiatrists and Insels, who headed the National Institute of Mental Health for over a decade before their stint at Verily and were Mou’s mentors through a series of startups. The serial entrepreneur herself, Insel said she felt “frustrated with the space of digital mental health and the sense of promise it brings, and what so far it cannot actually provide in terms of its impact on public health.”

Insel and Mou are some kind of framework similar to the Food and Drug Administration bar for safety and efficacy, in order to tame the “wildwest” of digital mental health. Their observations are shaky to ensure that digital health services, such as the Peterson Health Technology Institute, provide health outcomes to justify their costs.