Mental health problems – and the tech products that address them – come in all shapes and sizes. There are “mental wellness” products like Calm and Headspace. On the more serious side of things, there’s Cerebral, Betterhelp, and, of course, markets for real, card-carrying therapists. If you have more moderate mental health problems, there are players like Noom (collected $657.3 million) with NoomMoodNasdaq-listed talkspace, Forever and youper (raised $3.5 million), which offers self-guided CBT therapy.
Also in the CBT field there are chatbots like woobot (raised $123.3 million) and fournals like Alan Mind who use CBT.
In these “moderate mental health problems” there is also room Blooma New York-based digital “self-therapy” mental health startup that claims it can help with mild to moderate mental health problems.
The startup says its users become “their own therapist” by using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) through video self-therapy sessions to address stress, anxiety and sleep problems. All sessions are designed by Dr. Seth Gillihan, author of CBT and Bloom’s Head of Therapy and CBT.
It has now secured an $8 million seed round led by Berlin-based VC Target Global. Also participating were Elysian Park Ventures, AngelPad and Sequoia Scout, plus founding members Scott Chacon (GitHub), Dominik Richter (HelloFresh), Niklas Jansen (Blinkist), Roland Grenke (Dubsmash), Joshua Cornelius & Mehmet Yilmaz (Freeletics), Ryan Bubinski (Codecademy) and Mariya Nurislamova (Scentbird). So a nice European line-up of angels.
Bloom’s CEO and co-founder Leon Mueller said in a statement, “Bloom is doing for therapy what Calm and Headspace have done for meditation — making it affordable, accessible, mainstream and commonplace.”
He and co-founder Daniel Lohse say they got the idea for Bloom after moving to New York last year and each looking for therapists.