Celebrating Real’s Series B Fundraise
By Ariela Safira, Founder and CEO, Real
Today marks nearly two years since Real launched. What was meant to be a brick-and-mortar mental health studio set to open in April 2020 became a pandemic-pivot within a week, fueled by motivation to build the best possible mental health care model that meets people where they are. Our company’s innovative beginnings set a precedent for us to constantly listen, challenge our ways of thinking, and ask not how do we get more people to engage with healthcare, but instead how do we make healthcare something people want to engage with in the first place?
We’ve researched, innovated, iterated, and grown to create a mental health care system that is scalable and affordable for all Americans, is clinically effective, reaches people before they hit rock bottom, and offers something people actually want to engage with. For Real, 2021 was about being passionately focused on clinical efficacy and engagement. Now, we’re eager to spread Real and create a new world.
Today, I’m proud to announce our $37 million Series B fundraise to help us continue to bring our vision to life, led by Tory Patterson at Owl Ventures and joined by new investors Iyah Romm and Dr. Sylvia Romm. They join continued believers in Real, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Forerunner Ventures, Female Founders Fund, and BBG Ventures.
With this milestone, I want to celebrate the new world we’re creating and the team bringing it to life. Thank you to everyone at Real for bringing your presence, thoughtfulness, creativity, and innovation to build a new mental health care system. And to our visionary investors, thank you for recognizing the importance of investing in clinical efficacy and unlocking engagement from the very beginning. You’ve given our team the encouragement, time, and resources to build the foundation for a clinically effective and engaging mental health care system.
It’s time for a better mental health care system — we need it.
We’ve all seen the statistics and headlines: mental illness is spreading across our nation. People are suffering and will continue to suffer because the current system does not meet the needs of our country. Therapists in the US are working tirelessly to help clients — but we have a dramatic clinician shortage. We only have approximately 500,000 mental health specialists in the US, when we need (at least) 5.5 million therapists* to offer one-to-one therapy to everyone in the US. We’re currently operating at a tenfold deficit. We are severely understaffed. What’s more: today’s traditional system is oriented to treat illness. We need to build wellness instead. We know how to throw Prozac at struggling patients. We do not know how to build sustainable lives for people.
What we at Real have known for a long time is that we need a more scalable model in order to have a chance at reaching every American. But scale is just one part of the equation. We need the people we reach to actually want to engage with care.
To do this, we have to build for people and not for illness.
Here’s what we don’t talk about enough: we need to think beyond illness and think about people. Former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Dr. Thomas Insel recently shared in an interview that we cannot treat mental health care like we do the rest of medicine. Instead, we have to move past simply trying to reduce illness toward setting a more ambitious goal of focusing on sustainable care. You get there by centering people. And that’s exactly what we’ve been working on at Real.
By meeting people earlier in their mental health journey and expanding care beyond acute solutions, we can build sustained, long term recovery. This involves challenging many of the assumptions of the existing system.
At Real, we’re focused on giving people the tools to work on their mental health on a daily basis, not only when they reach a crisis. We’re building a product that is vibrant and accessible — from providing approachable ways for our members to track their monthly mental health to offering care in language that is warm and digestible. We’ve created a system that members are eager to engage with on an ongoing basis.
By centering people in our products, we’ve unlocked an entirely new care model — one we’re incredibly excited to share with the masses.
So what comes next?
We’re thrilled to partner with Owl Ventures to continue to transform the mental health care system. Using their insights and expertise from helping to revolutionize the reach and impact of the education sector, I’m eager to focus our sights on scaling access to Real’s high-quality, affordable care to all Americans, ultimately closing the existing gap in mental health care. Thanks to the strong foundation we built last year, we’re ready to support the entire country and make mental wellness an essential part of well-being.
*Assumes a 329.5 million US population, an average for 15 sessions per week a therapist sees, 3 months of weekly 1:1 therapy (or 12 total sessions) per American
