Mental health provider Flourish Health announced Monday a $26 million series A funding round.
B Capital, F-Prime and Cherryrock Capital led the funding round.
Only approximately 20% of children with mental, emotional or behavioral health disorders receive specialized care, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show.
Flourish Health seeks to bridge that gap.
Launched in 2022 by Natalia Birgisson, M.D., John Haskell and Josh Gachang, the startup provides a unique, in-home care model to help child and young adult patients with serious complex mental health needs. Flourish Health has raised $46 million since its inception, executives say.
Birgisson, who serves as Flourish Health’s CEO, said her experiences working in pediatric emergency rooms inspired the mission behind the startup. "I lost a young patient to suicide working in the pediatric ER. He was getting bullied at school and his mom felt lost trying to advocate for him. The next day, I cared for another teenager in crisis who was in foster care and extremely distressed about having to change homes again. I knew she needed more than another waitlist or referral, and there had to be a better way to help these kids and their families," she said.
Birgisson added, "I decided that I needed to connect all these dots and help build the missing piece in the healthcare landscape, which is how do we provide more robust services so that kids don't get into such a crisis that they need a hospitalization."
Flourish Health improves the wellbeing of children and young adults with serious mental health needs while substantially reducing hospitalizations and residential treatment. The company works with major health plans to support families navigating complex needs including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, trauma-related conditions, suicide attempts and disruptive, impulse-control and conduct disorders.
Patients are supported by Flourish’s Care Pod teams, which are made up of a psychiatrist, licensed therapist, patient guide and family guide. Professionals are supported by the company’s artificial intelligence workflow platform that seeks to reduce administrative burden.
Flourish Health Director of Family Guides Sharon Epps told Fierce Healthcare the team wants families to know they’re “actually entering a community.”
“So that's why we call them Care Pods,” Epps said. “We want them to feel connected to that support in a more intentional way.”
The company aims to help patients and families stay engaged between clinical visits, with opportunities like school advocacy, life coaching and primary care coordination.
“We've often seen that going with the parents to the school to support school advocacy conversations can be really the step that helps all these different systems align for patients,” Birgisson said. “We've had kids on house arrest who are feeling really socially isolated, and so going even for weekly in-person visits for a period of time and doing like art therapy has been really helpful.”
Epps said the team has noticed an uptick in referrals from detention centers and transitional homes, which they initially did not anticipate.
“A lot of the detention centers are welcoming the idea of being able to access care for those who are placed there,” Epps said. “And so to see even some success stories there has been rewarding as well.”
Flourish’s services are currently available in 10 states with thousands of patients served, executives told Fierce Healthcare. The company has grown 3X year-over-year since beginning patient care in 2023, according to Birgisson.
Moreover, the company says studies with major health plans have shown Flourish’s model results in 70% to 96% decrease in hospitalizations; a 69% to 90% decrease in residential treatment and a “sustained” 80% to 95% decrease in higher levels of care post-discharge.
The company’s tech-enabled approach makes reaching families that struggle to find care possible, according to Birgisson, who said a recent analysis from a health plan found the “vast majority of kids” in the program are in a “care desert.”
“Such that if Flourish was not available, there would be no other provider that could do in-person services,” she said. “It was kind of external validation that we're fulfilling our mission, which is to help the kids and families that other clinics just don't have the infrastructure for.”
The new capital will support the company’s national expansion, in partnership with the largest health plans in the country.
“That's the primary reason for raising the funding that we did,” Birgisson said. “And then the secondary reason is to always be ahead of our needs in terms of our platform, tools and AI support.”
The investment also will help advance Flourish Health’s proprietary technology that serves as the work hub for its Care Pods by bringing together patient touchpoints, electronic medical record and prescribing capabilities, workflow automation and team collaboration, according to executives.
“Intensive mental health care is extremely challenging, but it’s easier and more effective when a team is closely aligned and working together,” said Brett Cook, F-Prime partner, in a statement. “The clinical product Flourish Health has built makes team alignment possible at scale, helping psychiatrists, therapists and guides deliver coordinated, high-touch care without losing the human connection that patients and families need.”