Healthcare
See the 12-slide presentation this mother-daughter founding team used to raise $22 million for their new approach to virtual pediatric behavioral-health
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- Little Otter, a behavioral-health startup for children, raised $22 million in funding Thursday.
- The startup’s technology also provides mental-health assessments for families and caregivers.
- It employs behavioral-health specialists directly and gave them equity in the recent funding round.
As some investors predicted, funding for behavioral-health startups is still going strong in 2022 after a blockbuster year in 2021.
On Thursday, virtual behavioral-health startup Little Otter raised $22 million in Series A funding at an undisclosed valuation. CRV led the round, which also included investments from Torch Capital, Vast Ventures, Hinsdale, Boxgroup, _Able, Carrie Penner Walton, G9, and Springbank Collective. Since its founding in 2020, Little Otter has raised $26.75 million.
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Compared to mental-health startups, which have a narrower range of focus on conditions like depression and anxiety, behavioral-health companies, on the whole, take a broader, more holistic approach and often offer treatment for additional conditions like eating disorders and addiction.
Digital health has boomed during the years-long COVID-19 pandemic, and Little Otter combines several digital health strategies. It offers telemedicine visits via its app or website for parents and children between the ages of newborn through 14 years old for behavioral-health conditions, treatment, and ongoing assessments. Unlike some other telehealth companies that hire doctors on contract, Little Otter employs its psychologists, psychiatrists, and specialists directly.
Rebecca Egger, a former Palantir employee and project manager at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, started Little Otter with her mother, Dr. Helen Egger, in 2020. Rebecca Egger had realized that her mother’s work as a clinical psychologist was largely relegated to the confines of academia and wasn’t easily accessible to families in need. Particularly for younger patients, Egger saw an opportunity to treat the family unit as a whole for behavioral-health conditions as a more comprehensive approach than those popularized by current pediatric behavioral-health startups.
“When you are looking at kids, at young children, you cannot ask them about their mental health in the same way you ask adults, how are you feeling? What are your dreams? Are you depressed?” Egger told Insider. “For young children, it’s about seeing the unseen.”
Little Otter treats a range of conditions in children and caregivers, such as depression, anxiety, and attention disorders.
Little Otter employs its own behavioral-health specialists, psychiatrists, and therapists to assess, develop treatment plans, and conduct ongoing check-ins with both the children and their families or primary caregivers. Parents can receive special support as they navigate their child’s behavioral health or seek assessments of their own through Little Otter’s software and telemedicine offerings. Little Otter offers treatments to those adults as well, provided they have a child or dependent also using Little Otter.
Little Otter provided Insider with the presentation it used to raise $22 million in Series A funding from CRV and other investors. It was edited prior to Insider’s review to remove details on its privacy and security practices around patient data to avoid confusion, according to a company representative.
Here is the 12-slide pitch deck family behavioral-health startup Little Otter used to raise $22 million in Series A funding.
Little Otter is a digital behavioral-health startup that offers assessments, treatment plans, and check-ins for children and their caregivers.
The company was founded in 2020 by mother-daughter team Rebecca Egger and Dr. Helen Egger.
Rebecca Egger told Insider that many of the current options for pediatric behavioral health do not treat underlying conditions among family members or help coach caregivers through the treatment process.
After caregivers complete a questionnaire about their child’s behavioral health, they also complete their own mental health-assessment so the care team has a more comprehensive idea of other factors that may influence the final treatment plan.
The virtual treatment plans vary widely based on the patients’ conditions, Egger told Insider. Little Otter’s treatments include medication prescriptions, talk therapy, family therapy, and caregiver support, depending on each patient’s needs.
Part of Little Otter’s treatment plans includes teaching children and their caregivers ways in which they can manage their conditions, including changes to children’s medication or teaching them ways to better manage anxious situations when they are older.
Egger said that Little Otter uses anonymized data from the assessments and questionnaires to develop guidance on what is “normal” behavior and what requires a course of treatment, she said. All data is fully anonymized and never available at the individual level, she said.
There is also AI technology in Little Otter’s questionnaire software, which will match caregivers and children with the correct doctor based on the assessment responses.
Little Otter is currently available in California, Colorado, Florida, and North Carolina, with launches planned in Texas and New York by March.
Patients pay out-of-pocket for Little Otter, which does not currently accept insurance. It will help patients navigate potential reimbursements if requested, and has goals to work with insurance companies before the end of 2022.
Rebecca Egger and Dr. Helen Egger built Little Otter with support from their respective professional networks, with engineering leaders from Palantir and clinical directors from Duke. It has also brought on outside advisors from UCSF, Stanford, and Humana.
Unlike some of its competitors who use contractors, the company employs its clinicians directly and granted all 20 members of its full-time staff equity in the company as part of Thursday’s fundraise. The company declined to clarify the amount of equity provided.