New York City-based Radial announced Tuesday it raised a $50 million Series A funding round to expand its interventional psychiatry services model and underlying tech infrastructure.
The company will expand its footprint of in-network “modern brain medicine” clinics. Each will feature medication management and interventional psychiatry services such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and rapid-acting therapeutics such as Spravato. The company also provides neuromodulation services like accelerated TMS, guided neuromodulation, and EEG biofeedback, which insurance policies do not yet widely cover.
It will also develop additional proprietary software and clinical infrastructure.
The investment giant General Catalyst led the round. Other participants included Solari Capital, JSL Health Capital, Founder Collective, BoxGroup, Scrub Capital and Diede van Lamoen.
Today, Radial operates seven clinics in six states. Radial CEO and co-founder John Capecelatro told Behavioral Health Business that the company views much of the United States as viable for potential expansion. He pointed to the overall dearth of interventional services and an increasing demand for mental health services.
“I don’t think we have a strong point of view on markets that we’d avoid,” Capecelatro said. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We can do this in a broadly scalable and accessible way anywhere. So the question is, how do we sequence that growth relative to where we’ve already built and relative to how quickly we want to move?”
Capecelatro founded Radial in 2023. He formerly worked as an executive for Nava Benefits and PillPack.
Radial hopes to find clinical partners as it expands, particularly outpatient mental health providers. While the company offers therapy, it presently plans to keep its focus on medication management and interventional psychiatry. But Capecelatro said, “we also believe that there is very much a place for ongoing medication management and therapy in the context of these treatments.”
That belief may help Radial connect with the growing number of outpatient mental health providers in the U.S. that have been looking at interventional psychiatry as a new lane for potential services to give patients access to on their own or through partnerships.
However, the adoption of such services outside of psychiatrists’ offices has been slow. Providers are hesitant to take on such services due to the addition of potentially burdensome medical equipment costs. The service is so different from what most outpatient mental health providers do that it requires an overhaul of the provider’s model and workforce. What’s more, many providers lack the scale to do so and face a complicated reimbursement and authorization process before even providing the services.
“There is a very real need in these communities, even for med management and therapy — to say nothing of these interventional service lines — and I, for one, believe this market is big enough and deserving enough of as many people as possible to endeavor to go build and deliver an experience that allows consumers to access really effective care everywhere, period,” Capecelatro said.
Radial’s clinics span urban and rural markets. For example, it operates in New York City; Conway, South Carolina; St. Louis, Missouri; and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
What has been missing from the market, Capecelatro said, is a lack of purpose-built infrastructure for patients to readily access care, to match patients to the right care and help payers appropriately cover these services. For example, the company is working on its own systems of getting an accurate idea of what a customer’s insurance coverage and potential costs would look like and streamlining the prior authorization process.
“In research, we’ve proven that these powerful treatments work. They change lives,” Radial’s Chief Medical Officer Owen Muir said in the release. “The hard part has always been bringing them into everyday clinical practice. Radial was built to close that gap.”
In previous interviews, Muir has told Behavioral Health Business that advances in the adoption and research of interventional psychiatry practices — especially transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) — present a new opportunity for providers and patients alike when it comes to critical mental health conditions.
One study indicated that high-dose TMS cut depression symptoms by 87%, and 90% of people in the study were no longer considered depressed afterward. Another study from 2015 found that the positive effects of TMS can last at least 12 months and are meaningful both statistically and clinically.
The hope for these and other interventional psychiatry services is immediate and long-term symptom reduction without serious and lasting negative side effects. The long-term use of psychiatric medications and the difficulty of stopping their use has come to the fore in popular discourse.
Payers are taking note of such services. Enthea, a company that provides insurance plans for such services, has seen a 6,000% increase in interest over the past year.
Radial has secured several payer engagements to date. It works with Medicare, Tricare, VA-CCN, Aetna, The Cigna Group, UnitedHealthcare, and many BCBS plans, according to the release.
Still, Capecelatro notes that the combined payer-provider industry is still establishing how these treatments exist in medical coding and billing. The research and data about the efficacy of more cutting-edge services, like accelerated or fMRI-guided TMS, is coming out at a faster clip than payers can keep up with, he added.
“I think payers are really excited about this entire category of medicine,” Capecelatro said. “The evidence is very clear that these treatments are far and away the most effective set of treatments that we have for the indications for which they’re approved by orders of magnitude.”