Rose Health is looking to raise a $7.5M Series A and double its team

Baltimore-based mental healthcare company Rose Health is raising $7.5 million in a Series A round, with plans to grow its team by 34 and continue its rapid expansion.

So far, Rose Health has $3 million committed from investors and expects to end the Series A in early April, CEO Kavi Misri told Technical.ly. This amount already puts it ahead of its 2020 seed round raise. The company expects to spend 60% of the Series A funds on new hires like sales executives and operational, marketing, product development and customer success teams; 30% on research and development of institutional review board studies at Intermountain Healthcare and Johns Hopkins Medicine; and 10% on operations costs.

“We’re seeing significant momentum, given the shift to value-based care and how the current mental health crisis has stressed the system,” Misri said. “Rose will be highly strategic for emergency responders, risk-bearing entities and mental health provider groups who seek a way to differentiate themselves in the market by leveraging Rose’s capabilities to keep the patient engaged and empowered, and to provide an evidence-based approach for self-care.”

The organization currently has 27 employees, the majority of which are in Baltimore. Misri is the lone employee currently in DC. The expected new hires for the client success and clinical teams will be based in Baltimore, which is closer to the company’s chief medical officer, Dr. Matthew Peters.

Rose Health offers digital therapy tools to both expand access to therapy and help patients build resilience. Its technology uses natural language processing to detect “warning markers” in questionnaire answers and journal entries. This produces a Rose score assessing what could be early warning signs of depression or other mood disorders.

“Our approach takes deep tech, science and a human connection to really get the patient the right care at the right time,” Misri said. “Smarter mental health is needed to address the pain points that we’re experiencing right now during the pandemic.”

The company started out of Johns Hopkins, validating the technology through research and taking part in the university’s Social Innovation Lab. It is also an alum of DC’s Halcyon House. The company additionally  spent five months validating the platform in primary care settings through the Hexcite accelerator program of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center, the internal innovation hub which Rose considers its Baltimore office. The organization plans to continue growing in Baltimore, where the vast majority of its network and partners are based. Those collaborators include the Baltimore Neighbors Network, which Rose Health partnered with to bring its mental health tools to seniors during the pandemic. One of Rose Health’s  major goals this year is to expand those partnerships to include CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the mid-Atlantic’s largest insurer.

Donte Kirby is a 2020-2022 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.