HeyRitual launches with $2M to provide virtual couples therapy

Mental health visits through telehealth have remained high, even as the pandemic has waned

Couple's therapy is seeing a higher success rate now than it did decades ago, with roughly 70 percent seeing positive change, up from 50 percent on the 1980s. About 80 percent of therapists in private practice offer couples therapy and nearly 50 percent of married couples have gone to marriage counseling.

There are still major barriers to care, though, namely the cost, which can be as high as $150 an hour, plus the fact that it requires multiple people to coordinate their schedules. This causes most couples wait an average of six years after issues start to start getting help. 

One way to get over those barriers, especially the problem with coordination, is to use telehealth, which allows everyone involved to participate from wherever they already are. That is what HeyRitual, a company that launched out of beta on Monday with a $2 million pre-seed financing round, provides. 

Couples start by having a session with one of HeyRitual's experts, and together they explore their goals and needs; they then decide which areas of the relationship the couple wants to focus on, which it calls Pathways. 

HeyRitual offers 14 days of free relationship guidance, after which couple pay $7.50 per week, or $30 monthly, for the digital-first care plan; that includes a personalized learning path, access to expert videos, and a personal progress report, along with weekly check-ins, a guided journal prompt, and expert feedback.

There's also a hybrid plan, through which couple scan access the relationship resource hub, plus get two sessions of expert guidance a month, for $35 a week, or $140 a month. The most popular plan is the company's expert-led journey, which includes four 1:1 expert sessions per month and ongoing support for $50 a week, or $200 a month. 

HeyRitual has been testing its product with users across the U.S. over the past six months, and it found that its members reported significantly higher levels of relationship satisfaction after using HeyRitual for just four weeks 

The company's new funding round led by GroundUp Ventures, with participation from SamsungNext, Verissimo Ventures, 97212 Ventures, Fresh Fund, Homeward Ventures, strategic angel Jonathan Weiner, the Founder of HLTH, and super angel Errol Damelin. 

Telehealth has remained a popular tool for mental health visits, even as the pandemic has waned.

While overall telehealth visits have come down quite a bit from their peak, when they represented 13% of all outpatient visits between March and August of 2020, the same cannot be said of mental health; telehealth represented 40% of mental health and substance use outpatient visits, and still represent 36% of these outpatient visits.

"We created HeyRitual to deliver an experience that merges the magic of therapy with a scalable tech platform that empowers our users to grow on their own terms," David Pruwer, HeyRitual's CEO and co-founder, said in a statement.

"We're taking the tried and tested components of couples therapy and redesigning the experience for the modern digital era, providing our therapists with a host of tech tools to reach wider audiences in new ways". 

(Image source: heyritual.com)