Upheal — listen more, transcribe less

A couple months ago, we brainstormed at our team offsite about big untackled problems and gaps on the market. I love these kinds of debates full of imagination when people are not jumping to another call after half an hour of discussion. With covid, war in Ukraine and unprecedented volatility in today’s world we also touched upon a topic of mental health. The global numbers around mental health were accelerating even before covid and the past two years put particular pressure on our emotional and mental states — one in every five US adults suffer from mental illness. Within our discussion we soon realized we were looking at a very misbalanced market where too many patients chase an insufficient number of clinicians.

Despite the fact that there are more than 20,000 mental health apps available, in the end it is a remote or in-person therapy between clinician and patient which delivers the results. Considering therapists are serving a continuously rising number of patients and cannot really scale their practice, we asked ourselves:

Is there any way to create more slots in a day of a therapist? Can we make the therapist’s day more efficient, allowing them to serve more patients at a higher quality of care?

Knowing that founders are far better at spotting the gaps than VCs, we concluded that there must have been a team working on a solution we vaguely pictured in our heads. And we were right. Two days later I met with Juraj Chrappa, co-founder & CEO of Upheal who not only thoroughly walked me through the pain points of a therapist job but also showed me the prototype of the product aiming to digitally transform therapists’ workflow.

Together with his co-founder and CTO Martin Horvath they have been working on the product for more than a year. On top of their product passion and AI knowledge, they bring an exceptional track record from the most successful B2B companies in Czechia (ProductBoard and Avast).

Upheal is a therapy platform for mental health clinicians with secure video-calling, automated note taking and advanced analytics and insights. We are convinced that it can be a game-changing tool for clinicians as it enables them to fully focus on their patients and dramatically mitigate current admin burden. Therapy should be built around listening and supporting, not around paperwork.

Thank you Juraj and Martin for choosing us as your lead investor. We are extremely excited about your vision to bring superpowers to mental health professionals to free up their capacity…for those who need their help.