When Sonia García and Stas Sokolin decided to start Amae Health to solve the broken care system for people with serious mental illness, they were already well-acquainted with the industry’s issues.
“I started thinking about this problem a long time ago,” said Sokolin, CEO of Amae. “I grew up with a sister who had bipolar disorder for many, many years, and as a family we always struggled to find care 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 caring for her brother with schizoaffective and bipolar disorder. Sokolin and Garcia were introduced by mutual friends at Stanford because they were both passionate about this field. The couple knew the system could be better.
They launched Amae Health in 2022 to be a new approach to help patients with serious mental illnesses. Amae brings resources—including family and individual therapy, social workers, psychiatric care and medication management—all under one roof. A natural roof, that is, as Amae focuses on a personal approach. The startup hired Dr. Scott Fears, who had experience with this integrated care approach through his work with the Los Angeles Veterans Affair Hospital, so they could iterate and refine an existing model as opposed to starting 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, in addition to all of the company’s original investors. The startup currently has one 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 to follow soon after.
The funds will also be used to continue building out the company’s data platform. Sokolin said the company uses artificial intelligence to look at the data it collects in its clinic to find ways they can continue to improve care.
In recent years, many startups have launched to improve the mental health care system, but Amae Health’s focus area and approach stand out. Most of the mental health startups 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 also focused on helping people with serious mental illness. Serious mental health problems it affects 14.1 million people in the US, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But there is much less innovation in the field.
That’s not surprising: Solutions for people with serious mental illness don’t fit neatly into a traditional business model the way many telemedicine and digital medicine solutions do. People with severe mental illness require personal care, making solutions more expensive and slower to scale.
“When we first went out to raise money, a lot of venture capitalists were asking, why are you doing this in person? Why isn’t this virtual?’ Sokolin said. “The truth is, you can’t virtually treat someone who has delusions or auditory hallucinations. In the same way that you can’t cure cancer virtually, you can’t treat it virtually.”
The nature of the business also means they don’t expand to all 50 states at once, as some digital health startups have. García said the company is fine with that because it’s more focused on results than scaling.
“It’s about intentional growth and scale, not winner-take-all, but being really careful and conscious about how we’re growing and making sure we’re creating lasting change and recovery in these individuals’ lives,” Garcia said.
Trying to scale too quickly has hurt some mental health startups. Telemedicine platform Cerebral has come under fire for how it advertises to potential customers and how it handles patient data in its quest for scale.
That slower-growth approach can and has worked for the venture in the past, said Sokolin, a former VC at both the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Health2047. One Medical, a full-service health care system including personal care, is a prime example. The company raised more than $500 million before being acquired by Amazon for $3.9 billion. Not surprisingly, the former CEO is a current investor in Amae.
Sokolin and García are fine with the fact that their approach has turned off some potential investors. They are more focused on creating a system of quality care, not just how many patients they can see.
“There are far more people than anyone could ever treat,” Sokolin said of the range of people with serious mental illness. “We’re never going to deal with anything more than a small fraction, but we want to be the best-in-class provider for those members.”
