- Little Otter, a behavioral-health startup for children, raised $22 million in funding Thursday.
- The startup’s technology also provides mental-health assessments for families and caregivers.
- It employs behavioral-health specialists directly and gave them equity in the recent funding round.
As some investors predicted, funding for behavioral-health startups is still going strong in 2022 after a blockbuster year in 2021.
On Thursday, virtual behavioral-health startup Little Otter raised $22 million in Series A funding at an undisclosed valuation. CRV led the round, which also included investments from Torch Capital, Vast Ventures, Hinsdale, Boxgroup, _Able, Carrie Penner Walton, G9, and Springbank Collective. Since its founding in 2020, Little Otter has raised $26.75 million.
Compared to mental-health startups, which have a narrower range of focus on conditions like
depression
and anxiety, behavioral-health companies, on the whole, take a broader, more holistic approach and often offer treatment for additional conditions like eating disorders and addiction.
Digital health has boomed during the years-long COVID-19 pandemic, and Little Otter combines several digital health strategies. It offers telemedicine visits via its app or website for parents and children between the ages of newborn through 14 years old for behavioral-health conditions, treatment, and ongoing assessments. Unlike some other
telehealth
companies that hire doctors on contract, Little Otter employs its psychologists, psychiatrists, and specialists directly.
Rebecca Egger, a former Palantir employee and project manager at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, started Little Otter with her mother, Dr. Helen Egger, in 2020. Rebecca Egger had realized that her mother’s work as a clinical psychologist was largely relegated to the confines of academia and wasn’t easily accessible to families in need. Particularly for younger patients, Egger saw an opportunity to treat the family unit as a whole for behavioral-health conditions as a more comprehensive approach than those popularized by current pediatric behavioral-health startups.
“When you are looking at kids, at young children, you cannot ask them about their mental health in the same way you ask adults, how are you feeling? What are your dreams? Are you depressed?” Egger told Insider. “For young children, it’s about seeing the unseen.”
Little Otter treats a range of conditions in children and caregivers, such as depression, anxiety, and attention disorders.
Little Otter employs its own behavioral-health specialists, psychiatrists, and therapists to assess, develop treatment plans, and conduct ongoing check-ins with both the children and their families or primary caregivers. Parents can receive special support as they navigate their child’s behavioral health or seek assessments of their own through Little Otter’s software and telemedicine offerings. Little Otter offers treatments to those adults as well, provided they have a child or dependent also using Little Otter.
Little Otter provided Insider with the presentation it used to raise $22 million in Series A funding from CRV and other investors. It was edited prior to Insider’s review to remove details on its privacy and security practices around patient data to avoid confusion, according to a company representative.
Here is the 12-slide pitch deck family behavioral-health startup Little Otter used to raise $22 million in Series A funding.
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