Vanna Health, a serious mental illness provider, has secured $17 million in a Series B funding round.
The San Francisco-based company will use the capital to expand its clinical footprint, bolster its technology infrastructure and bring its care model to new markets.
“We want to help as many members as possible. So, our goal is to go into multiple other states,” Dr. Liz Kwo, CEO of Vanna Health, told Behavioral Health Business. “We’re expanding in quite a lot of regions right now, and we also want to improve our technology. We want to automate a lot more of the tasks, so that our coaches are armed with all the important not only skill sets and career laddering of what they need, but also the technology to sort of take the difficult, more manual task off their plates, and then look at predictive analytics, and of course, looking at claims data to support all the things that are automatic next steps.”
Kwo is newly in the CEO role at Vanna. She joined earlier this month, succeeding the company’s co-founder, Dr. Giovanni Colella.
Part of Kwo’s new mission is to steer the company toward new automation and predictive analytics capabilities to inform care in real-time, which some of the new capital will be put toward.
“On top of that, being able to constantly iterate and think through what we can do better, especially in the local areas,” Kwo said. “Because no one size fits all.”
The San Francisco-based company presently operates in Massachusetts and has partnerships in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Kwo did not specify which other states or markets Vanna Health may seek out next.
Vanna Health previously raised $29 million during the company’s Series A fundraise in 2022. The company was founded by Dr. Tom Insel, a serial entrepreneur in the behavioral health sector and former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Mental Health Director.
The latest funding round was co-led by the national insurer AlleyCorp and Health Velocity Capital.
The business model
Vanna Health uses a value-based care model to treat individuals living with serious mental illness. It revolves around three principles: people, place and purpose. Patients have access to medical professionals, coaches and physical locations that provide community and support to help get back on their feet and find a purpose.
“We ended up realizing payers… are very interested in working with us if we can take the highest cost claimants for them and do a wraparound service,” Kwo said. “Our coaches do outreaches, we do physical visits, we help them with everything from preventing evictions to looking at getting them scheduled for their PCP, getting them along acting injectables, all of that, and the business model is that we work with payers, we take full risk on the entire costs of their care.”
Untreated behavioral health conditions can often lead to poor health outcomes, driving up the cost of care.
Vanna Health isn’t the only SMI provider working on a total cost-of-care model. firsthand uses a peer-support model combined with wraparound services to improve a patient’s overall health.
Kwo did not detail if M&A could be on the horizon for Vanna Health as it expands, but did tell BHB that payer partnerships and localization will be key focuses as the company scales.