New York City-based telepsychiatry provider Talkiatry announced Tuesday that it secured a $130 million funding round, one of the biggest in recent memory in the venture capital-backed behavioral health space.
The famed venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz led the round, which included equity and debt financing. The funds will help the company scale up its value-based care offerings. Today, Talkiatry operates in 43 states, employs over 300 psychiatrists and is in-network with over 60 payers. Its payer partners include Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, United Healthcare, Cigna, and Humana. It also claims that more than 70% of commercially insured people have access to Talkiatry through their health plan.
The firm Perceptive Advisors also participated in the round. Banc of California provided the debt financing.
“Over the past few years, we’ve built one of the country’s largest and highest-quality in-network psychiatric practices, while proving with real-world data that we deliver superior health outcomes and cost savings,” Robert Krayn, CEO and co-founder of Talkiatry, said in a news release.
Founded in 2019, Talkiatry has raised $245 million in funding. It stands apart from most of the behavioral health telehealth companies that emerged near the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. It saw its first patient in 2020. The company focuses on operating on an in-network basis and employs mostly physician-level providers as W-2 staffers. Many companies using a similar telehealth model employ contractors that are master-level providers.
In January, the company announced it was expanding its services to include age-specific care programming for seniors.
Talkiatry claims its value-based care program with an unspecified “leading national health plan” led to a 68% reduction in hospitalizations, 32% fewer emergency department visits and $700 per month in overall health spending savings.
“Talkiatry has mainstreamed outcomes-based psychiatric health care and risk-based payment models,” Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreeson Horowitz, said in the release. “The company has built a reputation for providing affordable, high-quality treatment for psychiatric patients while creating robust partnerships with a continually-expanding payer network.”
The company’s last funding round, raised in 2022, totaled $37 million to support its national expansion. At that time, Talkiatry employed 140 psychiatrists.
The funding round comes at a relatively quiet time in the venture capital-backed behavioral health investment world. While the volume of investments is way down compared to the fever pitch of 2021, this year has seen a handful of more developed startups secure big-dollar funding rounds, suggesting that many investors are seeking better bets in the space and are further validating certain business models.
Some of the companies to receive these funding rounds include the in-person and online hybrid therapy provider Two Chairs ($72 million), the digital virtual platform for therapists Grow Therapy ($88 million) and the digital B2B addiction treatment provider Pelago ($58 million).
Dr. Georgia Gaveras, Talkiatry’s chief medical officer, and Krayn have been outspoken advocates against the Drug Enforcement Administration’s proposed rollback of telehealth initiation for controlled substances, a flexibility extended during the pandemic. They, as well as others, pushed the DEA during the organization’s listening sessions on the topic to consider creating the long-promised special registration process for telehealth providers to provide care with controlled substances on an exclusively telehealth basis.