Investment Targets Growing Company’s Mental Health Care Marketplace
MiResource , a mental health care marketplace that empowers health systems to connect their patients to the right mental health care, announces that it has raised US$3 million in seed funding with investments from Draper Associates, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, Royal Street Ventures, One Mind, What If Ventures, and GarageCap. The funding will enable MiResource to continue expanding their automated, online referral platform to connect individuals with the mental health care they need.
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Stephen Hays of What If Ventures notes: “As a mental health-focused venture firm, What If Ventures and our investors are eager to see companies bring solutions to market addressing one of the biggest problems in the market, which is mental health care navigation. This is a problem that many companies have tried and failed to solve as it is challenging to grow and maintain a provider network. We are impressed with MiResource’s unique approach in uniting university counseling centers to grow a national provider network. On top of that, we are continually impressed by CEO Mackenzie Drazan’s ability to secure partnerships with payors and build an incredible team, and we love her strong sense of purpose stemming from her personal motivations for building in this space.”
Jeffrey Stowell of Royal Street Ventures notes: “In addition to the long overdue attention being paid to mental health in general, at Royal Street we were just very excited about the team, especially Mackenzie and Gabriela, and the disciplined approach they were taking to solving what has continued to present itself as an intractable problem—not just getting people mental health care, but getting them the right mental health care. We don’t believe it’s an intractable problem, and we are convinced MiResource is going to be a huge contributor to solving it.”
MiResource partnered with universities as their beachhead market to demonstrate that there is a way to address and solve the data maintenance problem within the mental health care system. The Company created hyperlocal micro-marketplaces via partnerships with university counseling centers focusing primarily on university students. MiResource has established contracts with 25 university health systems to date and has helped connect over 50,000 students to a network of over 5,000 mental health providers.
“Connecting people to mental health care is challenging due to the difficulty associated with keeping information on mental health providers up to date at scale,” says Mackenzie Drazan, co-founder and CEO of MiResource. “We know that if we wanted to create a world where everyone has access to effective mental health care, then we needed to find a way to track all of this information on mental health providers. Through our work with universities, we have proven our ability to recruit a provider network, and accurately track information on their practice. The seed funding will be focused on growing our partnerships in higher education and pave the way for expansion into marketplaces that go beyond university students.”
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This important round of funding will help support the trajectory of the company and its mission to become the de facto platform for anyone seeking integrative mental health care. “Our goal is to become the single source of truth for the best treatment protocols, empowering payors, primary care providers, and hospitals to expertly triage and connect patients to mental health care,” adds Ms. Drazan.
In August 2020, MiResource also received a highly competitive US$1.2 million Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to build a novel machine learning model to further refine their ability to connect people with appropriate care.
“At MiResource we are committed to finding people the right mental health care for their needs. Our work funded by this STTR grant allows us to get closer to the goal of personalizing care referrals for any level of care at scale,” says Gabriela Asturias, co-founder and COO of MiResource. “We want to democratize access to the expert referral knowledge only a few privileged institutions offer their students by creating an evidence-based, automated, and personalized referral experience.”
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