Noma Therapy has announced a $4.25 million funding round to support the expansion of its partnership-focused virtual psychiatry offering, which includes ketamine-assisted therapy.

Behavioral health and health insurance industry vet Andrea Auxier leads the Denver-based company, which has gone through Redesign Health’s venture studio incubator.

Auxier told Behavioral Health Business that Noma Therapy’s mission is to be the preferred partner for other mental health providers already offering patients therapy as well as other health care providers. In so doing, the company seeks to narrow its strategic focus, lean into enterprise partnership to efficiently get clients and be a helper in outpatient health, not a competitor.

“I was a therapist in a former life. It just doesn’t feel right to try to take business away from therapists,” Auxier told BHB. “Also, if the patient already has a good and established relationship with the therapist, you don’t really want to mess with it because that’s not in [the patient’s] best interests either.”

Noma Therapy’s ketamine-assisted therapy, medication management and therapy are offered on an in-network basis, a departure from the cash-pay approach of other ketamine therapy providers. So far, the company has secured agreements with major commercial insurance plans such as Blue Cross Blue Shield entities in Colorado and Texas, as well as with Optum and UnitedHealthcare. It is also in-network with traditional Medicare, some Medicare Advantage plans, Medicaid plans, and the TRICARE West contractor TriWest Health Care Alliance.

The company was founded in 2022 and started seeing patients at the end of 2023. It launched as a direct-to-consumer (D2C) offering. It has now extended to business-to-business (B2B) partnerships that include therapy companies, hospital systems, primary care practices and independent psychiatric groups.

Today, the company’s business is split evenly between D2C and B2B. Auxier said she expects Noma Therapy’s business to eventually skew heavily toward B2B, a common pattern in digital behavioral health startups.

While the company will offer therapy, its will focus on treating those with an already established relationship with another mental health clinician. The company sidesteps the steep competition of hiring and challenges of contracting with therapists, removing a known barrier to scale in digital behavioral health.

As part of its funding announcement, Noma Therapy also said that it had secured “a strategic partnership with a leading virtual therapy platform.” Auxier declined to name the company.

So far, the company has focused on developing its clinical offering and partnerships with payers and providers. Following the investment, Noma Therapy will begin to explore innovative uses of technology, especially AI agents, to automate certain outreach activities or aid in clinical decision support, Auxier said.

Noma Therapy’s approach to ketamine

Ketamine has not been approved for the treatment of psychiatric conditions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, meaning that this kind of use of ketamine is considered “off label.” A ketamine-derived compound called esketamine was cleared as a monotherapy by the FDA to treat major depressive disorder (MDD) in January 2025. It was first approved to treat depression in 2019. 

Noma Therapy’s ketamine-assisted therapy program offers self-administered doses of rapid-dissolving tablets that are placed under the tongue. Dosing sessions are guided by a Noma therapist.

In the last several years, advancements in understanding how brain chemistry works in relation to depression have led to greater skepticism in the use of common psychiatric medication categories such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Other recent studies have shown a narrow gap between the medicinal effect and potential placebo effects of antidepressants. Also, a third of patients do not respond at all to antidepressants.

This has led to great interest in ketamine and ketamine-based products.

“I don’t think of this as antidepressants are bad and ketamine is good,” Auxier said. “It’s really about what’s right for a particular person or a particular group of people. We know that there is a significant number of people that, for whatever reason, haven’t responded well to antidepressants. And I should say antidepressants haven’t been as effective as we would have hoped.”

She also said that, generally, the pharmacological actions of ketamine aren’t completely understood by science but also noted that there is enough evidence to show the safety of the compound and very promising results for durable improvements to mental health.

The Noma Therapy ketamine program is about 4 ½ months long and includes two different pathways for step-down care and an aftercare and maintenance program. Auxier claimed there are diminishing returns for the impact of ketamine-assisted therapy. The company seeks to treat those with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other conditions who haven’t responded to other treatments.

While the company offers ketamine, a product likely to garner it attention from patients, Auxier was keen to describe pains the company has made so far to be able to treat complicated patients regardless of whether or not they would meet medical qualifications for treatment with ketamine. Patients seeking ketamine treatment are often already prescribed several other medications. Auxier says her target patient population is those with “severe mental health conditions.”

“From a clinical practice and ethical standpoint, we knew that there was really no great way to just deliver ketamine to these folks without really taking the whole picture of their medication history and their current medications into account,” Auxier said.

She also doesn’t want Noma Therapy to have patients using ketamine indefinitely. The focus of care is to engage the patient in ketamine-assisted therapy and also equip them with skills and new perspectives via therapy, which is mandatory to participate in the ketamine program.

Auxier hopes her work and the clinical approach of Noma Therapy can shake off what she sees as an unhelpful slough of discourse in the ketamine therapy and wider psychedelics space: that such therapies are about the journey and not the destination. Auxier believes that the reverse of that needs to be the prevailing approach of this slice of the behavioral health industry.

“There’s a lot of rhetoric that emphasizes the trip, the dissociative aspects,the fun part, the enlightening part of the drug itself,” Auxier said. “Our approach is really about that not being what we should be highlighting.

“We should be highlighting what happens after all of that is said and done, how the patient gets better and stays better for the long run, not just finding temporary relief through the drug itself.”