Blackbird, a neuroscience-backed hybrid mental health provider for children and young adults, has grown $17 million in February in a Series A funding round led by Define Ventures with participation from Frist Cressey Ventures and GreyMatter, bringing its total raise to $23 million.
The company’s CEO, Tom Peterson, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss why he went from an early investor to its CEO and how he’s now helping scale the platform to impact people struggling with mental health issues.
MobiHealthNews: Can you tell our readers a little bit about Blackbird?
Tom Peterson: So I started a company called Evolent Health with two other people and ran it for ten years and left right at the start of COVID and I have five kids. I had also returned prior to Evolent and received a master’s degree in mental health counseling. So mental health has always been a big priority for me. I used that mental health background to help build the clinical model for Evolent, which was really about wrapping care around primary care to move to value-based care arrangements.
After leaving Evolent, I was home during COVID with five kids; now they are 23 to six. Three of my children had pretty serious problems with the mental health system at the time and with mental health in general. My oldest, who is now 23, had some pretty serious problems with depression, treatment-resistant depression, where she was on three different SSRIs and, you know, nothing seemed to work. She had bad side effects with each of them. My now eight-year-old had been kicked out of three different preschools and we were worried about whether he would be able to stay in the fourth. We really didn’t know what was going on and were later diagnosed with some features of autism, anxiety, some speech language deficits and a whole list of issues.
And so my experience with the health care system was just a lot of trial and error where we, you know, just didn’t seem to be getting it right and we were just throwing things at the wall. I just felt like the standard of care didn’t really meet my expectations and I could afford to pay for the best care and access wasn’t the issue I was experiencing.
So I went looking for a model that was focused on this long term stabilization issue and trial and error and then I was introduced to the people at Blackbird.
MHN: Blackbird recently secured $17 million in Series A funding. What will the company do with the funds?
Peterson: The money will be used in several different ways. Our approach is to build community density with a hybrid clinical model. So we market what we call light local clinics, and a certain amount of our care is delivered from those clinics, but we do a lot of virtual care around that. We then build relationships with community referral sources such as schools, doctors and pediatricians in those markets. We’re going to expand the markets we’re in, and there are dollars that go into marketing and launching these clinics.
We will grow largely in the mid-Atlantic states and leverage our payer relationships to go from state to state. We build strong relationships with payers and then those payers will take us to the next state.
So the first thing we’re going to do is really use that money to expand into new geographies. But again, doing it in a way that’s disciplined and kind of growing in a way that’s very much based on that community engagement model versus trying to be in 50 states at once and having a challenge with matching supply and demand that I think a lot of digital health companies have survived. It also helps us keep our patient recruitment costs low because we get a significant amount of our business through word of mouth in these local communities where we don’t have to spend money on marketing to get them.
Second is to improve our infrastructure. So, new digital tools, the core technology backbone that we’re going to use to extend our clinical model on top of the workflow tools and enhance our EHR.
There’s a part of what we do that’s really data-focused because we take data points that we collect about the person in these eight different domains and we use that to identify what we call a biotype, which is sort of clusters of similar types of brain characteristics and then use that data to build treatment plans around that biotype to make sure we’re treating that root cause.
So, using this data, you can continue to get smarter about the relationship between underlying symptoms, biotypes, treatment plans, and outcomes. This becomes a flywheel for you to continue to improve your treatment plans. So that’s an area where we’re going to continue to invest and make better use of that core data. Then the expansion of the leadership and the GNA [general and administrative expenses] maintaining our scale would be the third major category.
MHN: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Peterson: The only other thing that I think is important is that we are really working to expand capacity in this space. So we have residency programs…and that goes from psychiatry to nurse prescribing to therapists to speech therapists, where we take them straight out of school and put them through a residency program in our model of building additional capacity. Because ultimately, you know, scarcity is something that needs to be addressed, and you can’t really address the problem without also addressing the supply problem. So we think that’s an important part as well.
