Teladoc Health (NYSE: TDOC) is continuing to grow its virtual mental health platform, BetterHelp, by focusing on the B2B market.
BetterHelp has grown from about $100 million to $1 billion in revenue in the last three years, according to Teladoc CEO Jason Gorevic at the 42nd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. To accelerate growth, Teladoc aims to significantly expand BetterHelp’s presence in the B2B market by offering its virtual mental health services to more employers and health plans.
“We are looking at opportunities to bring BetterHelp’s capabilities more and more into the B2B side of our business,” Gorevic said. “We’re … selling BetterHelp directly to employers, organizations, associations and we see more opportunity to do that.”
Teladoc is not the only virtual behavioral health giant with plans to seek growth in the B2B space. In 2023, Talkspace (Nasdaq: TALK) more than doubled its number of B2B payer sessions, shifting its revenue mix such that B2B sales now make up the majority of its business.
Expanding its B2B services is one of the key reasons Talkspace became cash flow positive. The company expects to break even by the end of Q1 2024.
BetterHelp, which Gorevic describes as “the largest virtual care provider in the mental health space,” will continue to focus on sustaining growth in its direct-to-consumer business while also ramping up the expansion of its B2B offerings.
“We continue to see a tremendous amount of opportunity in direct-to-consumer mental health care,” Gorevic said. “I don’t think that’s running out of running room. The ratio of gross profit to ad spend is about 1.5 to 1. That’s a very healthy business and a business that runs at a strong gross margin comparable to the rest of our business.”
Gorevic said that BetterHelp differentiates itself from the market by the number of clinicians operating on its platform (30,000) and its depth of data that drives better quality care, better therapist matching and a better consumer experience.
Investors have questioned if BetterHelp is running out of growth potential, but the company believes sustained, year-over-year growth is possible.
“We innovate every year to improve retention rates, to improve the lifetime value of a member, to improve our revenue yield per dollar of customer acquisition spend and to optimize the mix of the channels that we’re using for consumer advertising,” Gorevic said. “All of those things go into the mix to continue to not only grow the business but continue to get strong financial performance on the bottom line.”
Gorevic said that to get a full picture of BetterHelp’s healthy growth, investors should look at the company’s overall performance in 2023.
“You’ve seen a couple of years of tough comparables in BetterHelp,” he said. “It grew astronomically in ‘20 and ‘21. In ‘22. We had an irrational and, it turns out, illegal competitor in the market. That caused a weird cadence in terms of our ad spend. So that meant ‘23 had a weird set of comparables relative to the prior year.”
Looking forward, the company will “spend to grow profitably,” specifically through its B2B expansion plans.
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