• Empathy Health Technologies

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2024

  Empathy Health Technologies is the company behind Sober Sidekick, a free mobile application that connects individuals battling substance-use disorders with a 24/7 peer community, daily motivation, professional help and on-demand AA meetings. The app encourages users to both give and receive supportive messages and leverages an “empathy algorithm” that analyzes behavioral and language patterns to predict relapse risk, automatically triggering outreach when danger signs surface. Sober Sidekick has been downloaded nearly 1.1 million times, serves more than 145,000 monthly active users and has facilitated over 2 million peer interactions; an independent analysis found that five interactions on the platform correlate with a 68 % lower likelihood of relapse. While anyone can download the app for free, the company also signs value-based contracts with commercial and public payers. Revenue details were not disclosed, but Empathy Health intends to build a continuous-care infrastructure that shifts reimbursement from crisis response to relapse prevention. With its newest capital, the firm plans to deepen payer partnerships, enhance its predictive technology, and expand member-support operations, including data-science capacity and care-navigation infrastructure. Founded by CEO Chris Thompson, who drew on his own recovery experience, the company ultimately aims to redefine success in substance-use care by measuring sustained relapse prevention rather than episodic treatment.

• Sober Sidekick

  Participated · Seed · Jul 2024

  Sober Sidekick is a sobriety and recovery smartphone app launched in January 2019 by founder and CEO Chris Thompson. The platform leverages a mobile-first AI-driven approach, gamified peer-to-peer support and an "empathy algorithm" to deliver immediate peer responses and predictive analytics aimed at preventing relapses. The company reports a community of over 500,000 members and cites a 68% relapse reduction rate alongside high-accuracy relapse prediction. Its revenue model aligns payments with user recovery success, and the startup currently holds a contract with AmeriHealth Caritas while negotiating with three additional national health plans and state Medicaid programs. Sober Sidekick operates within the $43 billion U.S. addiction recovery market and has four full-time employees. The company was the subject of a 2023 Harvard Business School case study and was recently featured in Fortune and by Google Play.

• Happied

  Participated · Equity · Aug 2022

  Happied operates a platform that facilitates planning and management of in-person, online and hybrid events for companies. CEO April Johnson says many companies lack dedicated in-house resources to properly plan team, client, and community events. The company pivoted from a pre-pandemic B2C model that connected DC professionals to happy hour spots after acceptance into the 2021 Minnesota Twins Accelerator (produced by Techstars). Happied closed a $1.6M fundraising round to support its new direction. The funds will be used to build out a development team, invest in growth marketing, and expand the company’s in-person event geographies; the company is hiring a senior front-end developer. Johnson said the raise and customer feedback validate implementing their vision of creating meaningful, frictionless corporate events at scale using technology to improve attendee quality of life and return on investment.

No current team members are available.