Cerebral Inc.’s founding CEO is no longer leading the company.
The company announced Wednesday afternoon that “Kyle Robertson leaves his position as CEO, effective immediately” and that Dr. David Mou is now CEO.
However, Cerebral has not clarified whether or not Robertson legally remains a part of the company as an employee or investor. A request for additional comment has not yet been returned.
Jessica Muse, chief operating officer for Cerebral, will concurrently assume the role of the president while Dr. Thomas Insel joins the company’s board of directors, the release states. Insel is a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and clinical advisor for Cerebral.
“We thank Kyle for his service. His vision resulted in what Cerebral is today: a leading provider of urgently needed mental health services to people who were unable or unlikely to obtain treatment,” Mou said in the release. “Kyle led the company through the rapid growth that followed, helping hundreds of thousands of patients access effective and safe care.
“As Cerebral enters its next phase of growth, we look forward to expanding our services, guided as always by evidence-based clinical protocols, to help those who struggle with mental health concerns in silence.”
Robertson’s departure comes after months of criticism over the company’s prescribing practices, including the perception that Cerebral pushed its prescribers to get patients on controlled substances such as stimulants to treat ADHD.
Late Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that four of Cerebral’s board members, a majority, agreed that Robertson should be replaced by Mou.
Mou, a psychiatrist, became chief medical officer in February 2021. The company announced his appointment to the president role at the beginning of May.
The WSJ report also states that Robertson has not agreed to depart his role as of late Tuesday.
Robertson founded Cerebral with the former Chief Medical Officer Ho Ahn in 2019 and publicly launched the company in 2020.
It quickly garnered massive venture capital and investor support that most recently resulted in a December Series C funding round that landed $300 million and valued Cerebral at $4.8 billion.
Not long thereafter, criticism about the company’s tactics for growth, how it handled prescribing controlled substances, a reclassification of employee’s compensation to be hourly and performance-based rather than salaried began to nag at the company.
A former executive is suing the Cerebral over claims that Robertson and the company’s leadership retaliated against him over raising similar concerns.
The company appeared to be responding to the pressure in an announcement yesterday that Cerebral would eventually cease prescribing controlled substances, like those used to treat ADHD and certain depressive disorders, by the fall.
In early May, Mou appeared before a telehealth conference to defend the company but also admitted that the company had made mistakes but was learning from them.
Mou previously told Behavioral Health Business that the criticisms leveled against Cerebral ought to be redirected to the establishment mental health system that has a plethora of issues.
“We’re trying to reimagine this ecosystem of behavioral health: It’s so broken,” Mou previously said in a BHB article about how the industry classifies the employment status of clinicians. “At the end of the day, there are all these metrics — clinical outcomes and clinical safety, to me, should be the No. 1 thing. That should be the story.”
Editor’s note: Behavioral Health Business updated this story to reflect a new announcement Cerebral released after this story was published.
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