Osmund is a public benefit corporation that produces software for electronic mental health records. It announced Thursday that it had raised $15 million in Series A funding. Future Ventures (General Catalyst), Tiger Global, Offline Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, and Offline Ventures are investors.
Osmund software gives psychiatrists access to electronic health records commonly used by doctors but geared towards mental health. It also has software that tracks patient progress to provide suggestions for psychiatrists and de-identified data for researchers looking to improve treatments for specific conditions. The company assists drug developers with overcoming any other obstacles, including reimbursement, FDA approval, delivery, and storage, that may prevent patients from obtaining these treatments.
Osmund was created in 2020 by Lucia Huang, now CEO, and Jimmy Qian(now COO), while they were both studying at Stanford. One night they shared their personal mental health stories, discussed the stigma they experienced growing up, how the system failed them, and their mutual fascination with the future.
Huang says, “We wanted to create something that would truly move mental health and be in a position to help all the new providers that focus on patients with higher acuity and provide them better software while contributing to research.”
Qian and Qian looked at the mental health software ecosystem. They found it to be “a little outdated” because many records don’t accurately capture research-grade data and can’t measure the outcome over time. Osmund’s software assists in this process by automating as much as possible and allowing for different data streams.
Qian says that the software we use to accomplish this is software. We empower providers to give them software that will make their jobs easier and treat patients effectively. This software then allows us to gather many objective world evidence to see how people react to different types and combinations of treatments. We then give the information back to the providers to personalize the treatments and work with researchers to find new treatments.
Capital injection will allow the company to take more people in the engineering, research, and sales departments to grow its clinic base. The company serves over 215 mental healthcare practices in 38 U.S. states and plans to expand internationally. It will also continue to build its research platform to discover, develop, deliver and support new therapeutics and diagnostics to one-third of mental health patients who have difficulty with existing treatments.
Huang says, “Overall, [we] are making sure that patients and providers are being observed as much as possible. Then we have start to think about ways we can help researchers as a whole.”
Steve Jurvetson is cofounder of Future Ventures. He says Future Ventures aims to invest “can change the planet for the better.” Jurvetson said that Osmind was at the forefront of helping to create a positive environment for everyone, with depression having tripled by 2020.
The company will also expand its research collaborations and continue to build on existing initiatives like Fluence and The Ketamine Taskforce to Access Safe Care and Insurance Coverage.
Katherine Boyle, the general catalyst partner, says she’s excited about the team. It cannot reiterate enough that it is critical mission. Covid is an excellent example of why the pharma community and the scientific community must focus their attention on the mental illness crisis in this country. Osmund is committed to improving treatment and understanding the treatment-resistant population in the future.
