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. 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, biometric analysis. Anything that turns private moments into product metrics. But those same moments are what make therapy sacred. When you start treating them as resources, the whole idea of therapy begins to change.
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, 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 deck. 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.
