Partner Spotlight: Appa Health and UCSF Rosenman
What synchronicity when we can announce our latest company investment, while also recognizing a valuable partner.
Since founding Magnify, we’ve been on a mission to find remarkable entrepreneurs developing novel solutions to address the crisis in adolescent mental health.
As early as 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued the warning that mental health challenges were leading to “devastating effects” among young people. His statement came as the suicide rate for young Americans ages 10 to 19 jumped by 40 percent from 2001 to 2019. According to the CDC, about 1 in 5 high school students reported being bullied. Ninety percent of children are struggling with mental health and 30 percent are chronically absent from school.
We are grateful to have met the multi-generational and multi-discipline Appa Health founding team in the November UCSF Rosenman ADAPT semi-finalist pitch cohort. Serving as a judge in the ADAPT program for the second year, we have witnessed a range of remarkable entrepreneurs. ADAPT, a Rosenman Institute initiative, carefully selects these innovators to collaborate with leading healthcare providers and payor partners. This collaboration showcases their potential and significantly accelerates their go-to-market strategies.
The founders’ lived experiences with teenage depression and social anxiety, and their expertise in building profitable mental health startups, scaling clinical operations, and developing mentorship models, compelled our ADAPT judge cohort to lean in and vote them a 2023 Finalist.
Appa Health is working to meet the mental health needs of our children through public schools, where over 70% of kids are surfacing and seeking support. Their novel near-peer mentor model addresses both an industry lack of accessible and affordable therapists and our collective kids’ need for a more culturally aligned solution, and compelled our team to join their pre-seed investor syndicate.
Thank you USCF Rosenman Institute team for being such an effective convener of healthtech entrepreneurs and partner accelerators. And today we congratulate you both for Appa Health’s being granted the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Mentor Award.
Now that we can call Robert Miller, Katrina Roundfield, and Sean Woodruff Magnify family — looking forward to partnering on a world-class mentoring workforce of tomorrow.
