A cohort of more than a dozen companies in healthcare and drug discovery have been announced for a mental health innovation accelerator.
The One Mind Accelerator is a 10-week program that offers industry expertise and support for fundraising, business development, company growth and founder advancement. Participants will receive coaching from nonprofit One Mind’s network of more than 100 advisors. This year’s acceptance rate was less than 5%. Sessions begin this week.
“Especially in mental health, we saw that there’s a big gap at the early stages,” Carmine Di Maro, executive director of the One Mind Accelerator, told Fierce Healthcare in an advanced interview. “There’s not the same level of infrastructure and systematic support that you have in, say, consumer or fine tech.
“It’s not like building a consumer app,” Di Maro added. “It’s so complicated to navigate the healthcare system in the U.S.”
The accelerator’s network of advisors span entrepreneurs, investors, payers, providers and scientists. It is common for companies to sign pilots or contracts with groups in the advisory network, per Di Maro.
One Mind also has a venture arm, the Catalyst Fund, to invest in portfolio companies after they graduate from the program. Companies generally receive $300,000 if they meet certain criteria, like raising a round of at least $2 million, which Di Maro said most do.
This year’s participants, which encompass pre-seed, seed and series A stages, are:
Biomia: A biotech focused on central nervous system (CNS) disorders
Birches Health: A virtual provider for gambling and other addictions
Eratos Therapeutics: A drug discovery platform focused on CNS
Flow Neuroscience: A medtech addressing depression
Forecast Bio: An artificial-intelligence-powered preclinical research platform
Limbic AI: An AI agent for mental healthcare
Manatee: A family mental health provider focused on pediatrics
Monument Therapeutics: A biotech targeting psychiatric and neurological disorders
Neurofundus: A platform supporting precision drug discovery in psychiatry
Nosis Health: A substance use disorder provider
Orbit Neuro: A medtech focused on precision mental healthcare
Radicle Science: A data company studying the effects of non-pharmaceutical products
SocialRX: A social prescribing platform working with payers and universities
Vitalic Health: A geriatric-focused behavioral health provider
This is the fourth cohort of the accelerator, which first launched in 2023. Companies in past cohorts have raised nearly $1 billion combined and reached 1 million patients.
One Mind looks for companies it deems capable of making a scalable impact, Di Maro said. This includes having a sustainable business model.
“It’s really difficult to just be a point solution,” Di Maro said, adding payers are “tired of having to string together like seven different providers.” Payers want to see that a company can handle both low- and high-acuity patients and transition them between care pathways. “The companies that can do that are traditionally much more successful in getting contracts,” per Di Maro.
The healthcare companies in this cohort, Di Maro said, “are tackling areas of mental health that we haven’t seen tackled well in mental health yet." He added his belief that it’s a great time to be building specialized models of care.
One Mind is also looking at companies plugging forthcoming gaps in care and research due to federal funding cuts. And it plans to advise participants on taking advantage of programs being rolled out by the Trump administration, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ MAHA ELEVATE and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s EVIDENT initiative.
Among the companies, interest in tech and AI was a theme. “It’s just so hard for a service-oriented business to scale and have margins going,” Di Maro noted. Software can be scaled and help drive a business into the future, he explained. This year’s cohort is using AI either for triage, diagnostics or clinical operations streamlining.
Value-based care also shows promise, with payers interested in driving down utilization while maintaining excellent outcomes. But the shift has been very slow in behavioral health, per Di Maro, because it is difficult to measure improvements.
While measurement-based care has emerged as a trendy topic in behavioral health, dominating sessions at last year’s Behavioral Health Tech conference, some insiders including Di Maro believe few are actually doing it well. This year’s accelerator participants are thinking deeply about this challenge.
Additionally, One Mind is working with at least five of the largest payers in its advisor network to think through value-based pricing and standardizing measurement in behavioral health. The organization plans to publish some content on this and potentially explore a more official initiative.
One Mind is a nonprofit that was founded in 1995 to bridge gaps in mental health research funding and patient support. Today, One Mind is focused on advancing research and driving innovation to address today’s mental health crisis. Organizations supporting One Mind include Bank of America, the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, the Anthony Pritzker Family Foundation and others.