Mantra Health, a digital mental health provider for colleges, banked $22 million and launched a new insurance referral program for its users.
The series A investment was led by VMG Partners alongside participation from nine new and existing investors. The capital will go toward expanding Mantra’s diversity scholarship, provider network and payer partnerships. This round brings the company’s total raised to date to more than $27 million, the company told Fierce Healthcare.
Mantra partners with 52 campuses and serves half a million students. Its new insurance referral program, being piloted at the University of Minnesota, allows a partner school to offer students a chance to stay on with Mantra post-graduation. (It currently partners with Optum, Cigna and local payers.)
“In the current college mental health system, access to care on campus is typically tied to enrollment, carrying a certain credit load or, for international students on scholarship or student-athletes, for example, achieving a certain level of performance,” Mantra’s medical director Nora Feldpausch, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare. High-quality long-term care can make a meaningful difference in students’ lives, but access to care is often lost during critical periods of transition, like graduation, she added. COVID-19 added demand for services across campuses along with clinician burnout.
The vast majority of college counseling staff are burnt out, according to a new study Mantra released Wednesday. It surveyed 129 counseling center directors and clinicians, with 88% of directors and 93% of clinicians reporting burnout in the fall of 2021. More than half said their burnout has not changed or gotten worse since the fall of 2020.
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Because of the unique and pressing needs of each partner campus, Mantra wanted to be intentional from the start about the way it integrates with school software, said CEO and co-founder Ed Gaussen. Every campus is unique. “How do we make sure that we build a solution that allows us to bring a level of flexibility to a lot of schools?” Gaussen said. It offers a collaboration portal—an extension to its platform—for campuses that streamlines collaboration and extends campus counselors’ visibility into students’ care.
There can be many benefits to having a virtual provider network. Referred students don’t need to travel off-campus, deal with insurance or worry about a waitlist, Gaussen said. Mantra is free to students and offers the option to schedule appointments during nights and weekends. It also offers access to providers that may not be available locally or at all, as in the case of a Mantra partner community college network in Florida.
According to company data from one study for the past school year, 91% of students referred to Mantra went to their first appointment. And more than half of students said the program helped them stay in school.
Taking a student-centered approach and building trust in the higher education community was a priority for Mantra from the start, Feldpausch and Gaussen said. Mantra consulted with mental health experts in student engagement before building out clinical protocols, and it regularly tracks student progress and treatment outcomes. The company’s work is “only as successful as the quality of our clinicians, so the commitment was made early on to prioritize quality of care over sheer volume,” Feldpausch said.
While the company plans to continue growing its access through payers for post-graduation, its goal is to make sure students “get better and are self-sustaining after they receive their sponsored care” on campus, Gaussen said.