Mental Support Startup Virtually Connecting People With Custom-Matched Strangers Has Raised $18M

Ten years ago, when Jack Chou was in his early thirties he had the worst year of his life.

“My LinkedIn profile looked great, I had all these reasons to be happy but I was having an awful time,” Chou says. “At the time I didn’t think of it as a mental health challenge I thought it was life, the high pressure job, and the fact that my wife and were just having first child.”

It took a while before Chou came to accept it as a mental health challenge —which to his surprise, was shared by many people. So he decided to quit his high profile (and what many would consider Bay Area dream) job and started Pace, a mental health startup, we match normal people with total strangers to meet in virtual emotional health groups.

Earlier this month, Pace announced that it has raised $18 million, of which $15 million were raised in a Series A led by Pace Capital with participation by Sequoia and BoxGroup, following a previously-unannounced $5 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital.

Chou says that people come with all sorts of problems, usually normal life situations and and they are matched with a facilitator who runs the group and is a licensed mental health clinicians in their day job.

“We bring them through technology to talk, to have a conversations and feel understood by people who are going through something similar,” Chou says.

When a potential member wants to join the Pace, the platform asks them a couple of questions to understand what they are going through in life, and then offers an option option to do a short interview to understood more deeply where they are. The initial commitment is to jump in for 10 weeks with one meeting per week that lasts for 90 minutes. 

Members pay $89 per month and each group is usually comprised of 7 people guided by one facilitator. Groups are designed in a way that makes sense for the members, such as depending on the nature of why they decided to join the platform.

Chou says that today essentially all of the revenue goes to the facilitators but he thinks that over time if Pace keeps getting better they’ll have an opportunity to make a margin for the company as well. 

Chou, who’s a Stanford computer science graduate, previously worked at Oracle, Google, LinkedIn, and as a Head of Product at Pinterest, cofounded Pace with Cat Lee (Pace’s COO) whom he worked with at Pinterest, and Alex Shye (Pace’s CTO) whom he grew up with in the Bay Area town of Los Altos.

Pace, which is headquartered in San Francisco, currently employs 14 full-time employees and roughly 80 facilitators.