Excited to announce our investment in a $3.2M seed for Somethings, which provides mental health mentorship for teens. We are joined by General Catalyst, Coalition Operators, One Mind, Plug and Play, Gaingels, MVP Ventures and various angels, more in the official announcement on TechCrunch. Tau Ventures is an AI-first fund in Silicon Valley investing primarily in mature seed, typically when there is a pipeline of customers. We found Somethings to be intriguing in several areas (1) Strong need in the youth mental health space (2) an product-focused team, and (3) strong early traction.
1) The Need
Mental health is a pervasive illness affecting significant droves of people across different generations. Within the youth of today, data suggests that 1 in 5 young women and 1 in 10 young men before the age of 25 have experienced at least one clinical episode of major depression. Although much of the focus of incumbent mental health and wellness programs, with the government investing over 15 billion dollars annually, have been targeted at adolescents and older populations, mental health issues continue to affect young children and teens, where suicide rates have climbed to become the second leading cause of death among 10–24 year olds. There is a strong need to address mental health among teens, and Somethings tackles the challenge through matching older teens to guide and help navigate the journey with their younger mentees .
2) The Team
We were impressed with the team, highlighting the core leadership below:
- Patrick Gilligan — CEO/founder; B.S. in Product Design and M.S. in computer science at Stanford
- Gabe Weider — Head of Mentorship; B.S. in Product Design, previously part of mentoring teen mental health organization
- Neel Patel-Shah — Founding engineer; former SWE at Snackpass. CS at Berkeley
3) The Product
Somethings is a platform that provides an end-to-end full stack mental health platform designed specifically for teenagers struggling with depression and other mental health issues. The platform connects teens to older teens/adolescents who have gone through mental health counseling training as a peer-to-peer support system. It utilizes AI-powered algorithms to match mentor & mentees and enables prompts to help support mentors through counseling processes and allows for a smooth conversation as well as alerting when responses are considered concerning by mental health counseling training handbooks. Somethings’ current business model is a D2C consumer healthcare play with inbound interest from United Health Plan as a pathway towards B2B2C business model.
Primary author of this article is Sharon Huang, in collaboration with Amit Garg. Originally published on “Data Driven Investor,” am happy to syndicate on other platforms. Amit is a Managing Partner and Cofounder of Tau Ventures with 20 years in Silicon Valley across corporates, own startup, and VC funds. These are purposely short articles focused on practical insights (I call it gl;dr — good length; did read). Many of my writings are at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amgarg/detail/recent-activity/posts and I would be stoked if they get people interested enough in a topic to explore in further depth. If this article had useful insights for you, comment away and/or give a like on the article and on the Tau Ventures’ LinkedIn page, with due thanks for supporting our work. All opinions expressed here are my own.
