Venture capital has brought incredible innovation to technology, but in mental health, it also brings pressure -- the kind that doesn't sit well with the pace or purpose of a client sitting across from their therapist.
Therapy isn't designed to scale like software. It's slow by nature. It depends on boundaries, on trust, on things that don't naturally start making compounding levels of revenue. But when startups in the mental health space take VC funding, they inherit a new priority: growth. More users, more engagement, more data, more technology, more revenue. And that's where things start to shift.
To grow, companies need something they can measure. Data becomes the currency -- session recordings, transcriptions, emotion tracking, historical or biometric analysis. Anything that turns private moments into product metrics and new technologies that can be neatly packaged up and shown off for the next funding round. But those same private moments are what make therapy sacred. When you start treating them as resources, the whole idea of therapy begins to change.
Truly, sit back and think about how therapy is so directly tied to time spent with a client. Therapists get paid $X per session. As a private practice, you can double your revenue by doubling the amount of sessions each week. That's not a typical Silicon Valley strategy... You want to find some magical multiplier that requires less time and less resources, not a revenue strategy that scales one-to-one with time worked. The latter is not going to impress your investors, and if your a VC-backed company that's looking to "streamline" access to therapy, well, you're going to have to figure out something else.
There's a difference between building technology for therapy and building a business out of therapy. One tries to support the work that already happens between therapist and client. The other tries to own it.
If a mental health company's path to success depends on recording sessions or extracting data from private conversations or taking advantage of therapists (and clients), that's not a business model -- that's a boundary violation dressed up as innovation. (And yes, we're well-aware that Halloween is right around the corner.)
The irony is that the healthiest kind of growth in this field won't impress a VC group. There will be no jaw-dropping Powerpoint slides in the boardroom. Healthy therapist- and client-first growth looks more like restraint. Like deciding not to record. Like protecting spaces that can't be monetized.
Because some parts of care don't need to scale. They just need to stay human.
