Bend Health secures USD 32 million in funding

Bend Health, a youth- and family-focused telebehavioral health company, has secured $32 million in funding.

The Madison, Wisconsin-based startup has emerged from a quiet start in its early development with money to fine tune national processes and hire more clinicians. Already, it has clinicians available in all 50 states and Washington D.C. with active caseloads in most of them, Dr. Monika Roots told Behavioral Health Business.

Monika Roots co-founded the company with her husband, Kurt Roots. Monika is the president and chief medical officer, and Kurt is the CEO. The company was founded and launched in 2021.

Bend Health raised $32 million between a seed round and a Series A round. The latter saw participation from venture capital firms Maveron, SteelSky Ventures, and WVV Capital.

“This is really about focusing on the problem, which is the pediatricians who are in crisis out there on the frontlines,” Roots said.

The company provides telemental health services to children and young people up to age 17 and may start seeing patients as old as 26 later in the year. In addition to a direct-to-consumer option, Bend Health seeks to partner with health systems to implement a child- and family-focused version of the collaborative care model. It also works with other enterprise customers to allow access to Bend Health’s care as a covered benefit.

“With kids, because there is so little access, this form of combined care does not usually occur even though it has the most evidence to support it,” Roots said.

Bend Health overlays a family systems approach to the collaborative care model that eschews medication as the first option for children. Roots described cases where uncoordinated care resulted in children with mental health conditions being prescribed several medications because none of the children’s specialists coordinated their care.

It provides care and support via video chats, unlimited messaging and integrated digital experiences. Bend Health uses artificial intelligence to support its measurement-based care system.

Bend Health’s national payer partners include UnitedHealthcare and Magellan Health’s California entity. Both partnerships are for commercial and fully insured members. Across all payer and employer partnerships, Bend Health is accessible to 170 million people, according to a news release.

Magellan Health, a managed behavioral health care company, was acquired by Centene Corp. (NYSE: CNC) in January 2022.

Its health system partnerships include Sauk Prairie Healthcare, Allegro Pediatrics, and other multi-specialty systems with 500 doctors and care providers nationwide.

Bend Health provides care for several conditions, including mental health disorders — such as anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder — various addictions, and other support services.

“Our partnership with Bend on whole-person, whole-family mental healthcare has accelerated access to care from six to 18 months to a matter of days, solving an especially critical challenge for rural communities,” Dr. Ellen Wermuth, a family physician with Sauk Prairie Healthcare in rural Wisconsin, said. “This is meaningful progress, and everyone across health care must continue working together to address our national mental health care crisis. If not to ourselves, we owe it to our children.”

Bend Health employs just over 100 people, about 60 if which are providers. It employs most of its providers but must include opportunities for contract providers to account for the realities of the pediatric mental health workforce, Roots said.

The company has established its tech platform and rolled out its measurement-based care system, Roots said. Its funding will largely be focused on scaling the platform through hiring more clinicians and establishing more partnerships with health systems and other enterprise patients.

Virtual pediatric behavioral health is seeing a lot of investment from venture capital firms. Beaming Health raised $1.98 million while Fort Health landed about $9 million, according to a recent review of public financial documents.

Private equity firms have also sought to aid youth-focused behavioral health providers in their expansions. In January, Muir Wood LLC, a youth behavioral health provider, secured investment from the private equity firm Avesi Partners while Consonance Capital Partners made a $400 million investment in the national youth mental health provider Embark Behavioral Health. Behavioral Health Business