Exclusive: Mental health care for new and expecting moms

Mavida Health, a Los Angeles-based maternal mental health platform, raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding, cofounders Sarah Oreck and Emma Sugerman tell Axios exclusively.

Why it matters: According to a recent CDC study, mental health disorders are the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths.

Details: The Mavida Health app is clinical care, and it offers one-on-one therapy, group, family and couples therapy as well as the ability to prescribe medications.

How it works: New mothers download the app and onboard via a short questionnaire to assess clinical need and fit.

• The company offers community and content nationwide and launched with the company's postpartum offerings.
• "We are currently offering clinical care in California but will quickly expand to the full path to parenthood, as well as additional states, including New York, in the coming months," the founders say.

Zoom in: They closed the round in three or four months, or "sooner than they thought," but doing so did not come without surprises.

• "For us, some of the biggest surprises came from who our idea was resonating most with and, therefore, who was excited to take a chance on us at such an early stage," say Sugerman and Oreck. "As female founders focused on women's health, we certainly had some guesses that our earliest supporters might be female-led or female-focused funds, but that ended up not being the case this round."

What's next: This round of funding should have a runway of 12-15 months.

• "We raised at the beginning of this year and we'll be looking to get back out to market later early 2024, as we are laser-focused on what we needed to accomplish as an early-stage business — bringing a product and service to market that people meaningfully and repeatedly engage with, leading to early but significant improvement in clinical outcomes."
• The company has started seeing its first patients and is generating revenue, but Sugerman and Oreck declined to get into specific numbers.

• "We built Mavida to really intentionally consider scalability (and profitability) from day one," they say. "For us, that means establishing meaningful relationships with the partners that can provide the broadest, affordable access to those on the path to parenthood."
• The funds will be used for building the product and hiring a team to launch. They say they want to fulfill their mission of bringing a product and service to market that people meaningfully and repeatedly engage with, leading to early but significant improvement in clinical outcomes.