Resilience Lab cofounders Marc Goldberg and Christine Carville.
Courtesy of Resilience LabChristine Carville and Marc Goldberg have raised a series A round to expand their mental health startup Resilience Lab, which aims to boost the number and diversity of providers in the sector.
For over half a decade, Christine Carville, a practicing therapist, has taught future therapists at Columbia University. After years of teaching she noticed a pattern. Upon graduation, her students were faced with a catch-22: they needed two years of therapy experience for most open jobs, and without a job there was no way to acquire the experience.
That led Carville and her husband Marc Goldberg to found Resilience Lab in 2019. The company’s goal is to build a bridge between academic training and real-world experiences within the mental health field in order to address crucial problems facing the industry: a shortage of well-trained therapists and a lack of diversity among clinicians. To expand their solutions for these challenges, Carville and Goldberg announced on Thursday that Resilience has raised a $15 million Series A funding round, led by Morningside and Viewside Capital Partners.
The New York-based company has three product and service offerings: Resilience Lab, Resilience Institute and Resilience Dashboard. Lab is an in-person and online service that matches clients with clinicians. Clients use the company’s website to connect to therapists and participate in either in-person, telehealth or hybrid sessions. To date, the company has 230 clinicians and around 2,500 clients, all based in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The company provides coverage from several different insurance companies such as Aetna
“We have no interest in building Lyft or Uber for therapy — that has been done, other people are doing it.”
Another challenge that Resilience Lab aims to tackle: over 80% of practicing therapists in the U.S. identify as white, leaving minority groups feeling neglected when it comes to their mental health. In terms of tackling intimate issues around mental health, people are more comfortable working with someone who shares their background. Absent that, they are less likely to get help. To combat this issue, 50% of Resilience Lab therapists identify as people of color or within the LGBTQ+ community.
“People want to identify and work with clinicians [who] they don’t have to explain the conditions of their experience [to],” Carville tells Forbes. “They don’t want to have to bring a white clinician up to speed on what it’s like living in a Black body.”
Another major problem for people trying to get mental healthcare is the nationwide shortage of caregivers. That’s where the Resilience Institute fits in. It’s an online, post-graduate education platform that provides training to pre-licensed therapists as well as refresher courses for practicing clinicians to keep up with best practices. Carville and Goldberg believe that the shortage of well-trained mental health professionals in the U.S. is the reason why four in 10 adults who need mental health help don’t receive it. The Institute, which is completely free for students, provides proper training in an attempt to improve the workforce.
Finally, if you’ve ever had to deal with the maze of insurance and other issues involved in paying your medical bills, know that your doctors can relate. It can be a challenge to properly bill for services, especially dealing with multiple insurance companies. To make the billing process easy on clinicians, Resilience Lab created Resilience Dashboard. This software automates billing and reimbursement while estimating care outcomes. This allows physicians the comfort of focusing more time on clients and less time on back office issues.
With its new $15 million capital infusion, Resilience plans on expanding multiple aspects of its services. First, it plans on improving the Institute's courseware and developing more online material. Secondly, the money will go into advancing the software and using artificial intelligence to help clinicians understand what methods are working and where to improve treatment outcomes. Lastly, with a revenue run rate of $10 million per year, Goldberg says that progressing Resilience Lab’s brand is a big area of interest as well.
“What we do is invest in marketing and helping people find us. So, this is content, this is demand marketing and negotiating partnerships with insurance companies,” Goldberg says. “We’re looking at what value-based care means and how we can best align what we do with what the insurance company is doing.”
Carville and Goldberg believe that the hundreds of telehealth platforms popping up over the last few years have dampened the mental health industry, creating burnout and a rotating door of clinicians coming in and out of the field. The two want Resilience Lab to be a lasting name and a solid employer in the mental health space in the long run.
“We have no interest in building Lyft or Uber
MORE AT FORBES
