Growth Fund Case Study: SonderMind

What Alumni Ventures Liked About SonderMind

• Commitment to quality of care: SonderMind’s business model, go-to-market and technical strategy, and growing suite of tangential services are centralized around optimizing the quality of provider care. This drives retention from both patients and providers and differentiates SonderMind from competitors focusing on enterprise-wide contracts and subscription models.
• Large addressable market: The U.S. behavioral health market was valued at $77 billion in 2021 and is forecast to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 3.6% through 2028. SonderMind is well-positioned to take an attractive share of this market by making it easier for patients and service providers to connect.
• Developed technology stack: SonderMind’s proprietary learning model is consistently improving operations and data integrations across a complex ecosystem of payors, insurers, and provider networks. This system also employs AI to intelligently pair patients with providers and aggregate insights to improve the user experience.
• Experienced team: With a proven track record and domain experience, the company’s executive team’s is led by CEO / Co-Founder Mark Frank, a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits.

Rounds and Co-Investors

Alumni Ventures’ initial investment in SonderMind was a $2.5 million Seed round led by Kickstart Seed Fund in 2018. This was followed last August by participation in a $150 million follow-on round of funding led by Drive Capital.

In the two years between Q1 2019 and Q1 2021, quarterly revenue grew 22.5x. In addition, the number of active patients and providers grew ~330% from May 2020 to May 2021. Platform adoption and usage rates are accelerating in both existing markets and new markets.

• Lead firm Drive Capital is a well-established healthtech investor with ~$1.2 billion AUM founded by two former Sequoia Capital Partners. Drive’s exits include Root Insurance (IPO $6.8B billion), healthcare company Triggr Health (purchased by SonarMD), and Duolingo (IPO ~$5 billion).
• Drive’s investment was led by Partner Molly Bonakarpour, who has extensive healthcare investing experience. She served as the Director of Commercial partnerships at Livongo, where she built partnerships with some of the largest players in the healthcare ecosystem. Livongo had an IPO in 2019, followed by a $13.9 billion acquisition by Teladoc in 2020.*

*Co-investors and investments listed are for illustration purposes only. These co-investors are some that AV has historically co-invested with and is not a predictor of future co-investors for any given portfolio company. There is no guarantee of who will be the co-investors. These investments are not intended to suggest any level of investment returns; not necessarily indicative of investments invested by any one fund or investor. Many returns in investments result in the loss of capital invested. These investments are not available to future fund investors except potentially in certain follow-on investment options.