Mental health issues, and the tech products that target them, come in all shapes and sizes. There are “mental wellness” products like Calm and Headspace. On the harsher side of things, there’s Cerebral, Betterhelp, and of course marketplaces for real therapists with a card. If you have more moderate mental health issues, there are players like Noom ($657.3 million raised) with NoomMoodlisted on Nasdaq conversation space, Lasting Y youper (raised $3.5 million), which offers self-guided CBT therapy.
Also in the field of CBT there are chatbots like aybot (raised $123.3 million) and newspapers like alan mind that take advantage of CBT.
In this space of “moderate mental health” problems, it is also To flourisha New York-based digital mental health “self-therapy” startup that claims it can help with mild to moderate mental health issues.
The startup says its users become “their own therapist” by using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) through video self-therapy sessions to address stress, anxiety and sleep problems. All sessions are designed by Dr. Seth Gillihan, author of CBT and Director of Therapy and CBT at Bloom.
An $8 million seed round is now secured, led by Berlin-based VC Target Global. Elysian Park Ventures, AngelPad and Sequoia Scout also participated, as well as founders such as Scott Chacon (GitHub), Dominik Richter (HelloFresh), Niklas Jansen (Blinkist), Roland Grenke (Dubsmash), Joshua Cornelius & Mehmet Yilmaz (Freeletics), Ryan Bubinski (Codecemia) and Mariya Nurislamova (Scentbird). So a nice European lineup of angels.
Bloom CEO and co-founder Leon Mueller said in a statement: “Bloom is doing for therapy what Calm and Headspace have done for meditation, making it affordable, accessible, mainstream and everyday.”
He and co-founder Daniel Lohse say they got the idea from Bloom after moving to New York last year and trying to find therapists.
