Brooklyn, New York-based Valera Health has acquired the digital suicide prevention startup Vita Health.

The deal expands Valera Health’s presence in digital psychiatry. The move’s most important result is improving clinical capacity at the company, further allowing it to care for even the most acute patients who can be treated as outpatients.

This, in turn, potentially positions Valera to push forward with value-based care contracting and other payment efforts that reward clinical quality, not just the time spent on or the volume of care, Craig Albright, CEO of Valera Health, told Behavioral Health Business.

“The value-based care opportunities — though slow to evolve — are coming,” Albright said. “They will come, we think, fastest for the most difficult to treat and the most expensive patient populations. So we went through this process because we were looking for complementary clinical competency.”

The deal closed on May 21. Specific terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Albright told BHB that the deal is a merger of the equity of each company and was not a “liquidity event” for either. Previous investment firms in Vita Health will engage with the board of the combined company: LFE Capital will join the board as a member organization, while Flare Capital Partners and CVS Health Ventures will engage as board observers.

Focusing on patients with more acute presentations of symptoms has been Valera Health’s differentiator since its founding in 2015. The company provides psychiatry and therapy services for adults, adolescents, and children ages 6 and older.

It operates similarly to a specialty medical group that focuses on partnering with other health care organizations rather than taking its services directly to consumers.

Valera Health also sets itself apart from its digital mental health peers by employing clinicians as staff members rather than contractors, which is more of the norm for a variety of companies in the digital space. It also focuses on services offered on an in-network basis and works with several types of health plans, including commercial, Medicaid and Medicare plans. The bulk of Valera’s patients are on Medicaid, Albright said.

The company has raised about $79.5 million since its founding in 2015. More than half of that figure comes from a $44.5 million round announced in October 2022. In 2024, Valera Health reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2024 that it had raised $9.1 million of an $18.2 million equity and options funding round. 

Based in New Haven, Connecticut, Vita Health had raised about $31 million across two rounds; its latest round was announced in January 2024. The company focuses on psychiatric services for teens and young adults, delivered via telehealth.

Combined with Vita Health, Valera Health will continue to offer services to adolescents and adults. All told, Valera Health now employs about 250 clinicians.

Vita Health is an operating subsidiary of Valera Health. Over the coming several months, the management teams of each organization will merge, and, eventually, the clinical and operational processes will begin to “blur” into one, Albright said.

Albright took on the CEO role, succeeding co-founder and founding CEO Dr. Thomas Tsang, in May 2023.

Suicide and self-harm rank at No. 11 among all causes of death in the U.S., and are the second-leading cause of death for those aged 10 to 14 and 25 to 34, according to data from The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

Experts have previously told BHB that value-based care contracting has the most obvious application and greatest likelihood for success treating acute patients in acute settings, largely given the physical health care industry’s progress in value-based care contracting.

Treating serious mental illness (SMI) specifically has a significant collective opportunity for alleviating pain at the individual and systemic levels. People with SMI live significantly shorter lives, often dying much earlier than other groups due to worse physical health.

Overall medical spending for patients with SMIs is 24% higher, while they experience 48% lower earnings over a lifetime.